Read Online Hiroshima in the Morning by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto - Free Book Online
Authors: Rahna Reiko Rizzuto
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the exact number of amoxicillin bottles I’ve poured down the throat of one child or the other in my years of young motherhood. Which one cried, which one I had to sit over, lying him on the ground and pinning his arms with my knees so I could hold his mouth open and get the medicine in. The memory of one son catching the medicine in his mouth and spitting it back into my face is my first thought when Brian adds the latest ear infection to his list of domestic upheaval, but to remind him of it now seems churlish. I can’t figure out why it should seem so.
I listen, and murmur comfort about the ear infection. I murmur comfort about his mother’s lengthy visit and some problem I dismiss with the people who live downstairs. I am waiting for the last three days of their life in New York to be thoroughly covered, for my turn to speak, because I finally have some progress to report. I’ve done an interview, with another one lined up. I tell him how odd it was—perhaps
the effect of translation—how the answers felt packaged, pre-prepared. I tell him about Ami, who has agreed to help me with the translations and how we’ve been talking about how to get the real story.
I can hear myself, hear that I am rushing to fill a silence, that I’m reporting, not having a conversation, and that Brian hasn’t spoken. As I wait for his reaction, I find myself talking—I don’t even know about what. I push on, trying not to hear the empty space between us. I want him to know that the trip is not a failure; I am not a failure. He doesn’t have to know I did nothing to set the interview up.
“That’s great,” Brian says. “No apartment?”
The boys have to start their day, he tells me—it’s Saturday morning and time to get going. And it’s late for me, too; time to go to sleep. I dumped too much on Brian just now. I don’t know why my mind wandered so far toward my own preoccupations.
“I miss you,” I say, stopping myself from adding, “Really.” It’s my imagination that he isn’t listening, or his lack of sleep. “Tell the boys I miss them too.”
“W e ate the remnants of dried beans. They used to crush the beans to make oil, and take the meat for food, then they’d take the skin off, crush it together and somehow make it into a round cake. That’s what they were feeding the horses, but they kept some for human consumption, and I remember that was rationed too. We ate those. We would break it into little pieces and put it in water and try to make some kind of soup.
“Pretty soon, there wasn’t even rice, not even brown rice. I remember eating any kind of leaf from any kind of vegetable, and eating ordinary grass. When we ran out of vegetables, everything was eaten. Anything edible.
“Here’s another kind of thing we had to eat. Inago , the small grasshopper. They said it had a lot of protein, nourishment, so we used to capture them in the rice fields. We’d dry it, cook it with shoyu or something just to get the flavor.”
—Seventy-one-year-old male survivor
THREE WOMEN
I MUST BE MORE productive now. I have heard the stories of two survivors; I have notes and tapes and no clear idea of what they mean to me. If I had a plot rather than a vague urgency, rather than a need to know, as in Americans don’t know! , I might be feeling more accomplished. What was it that they did not know exactly; what was this need of mine, which I could taste but not identify? I’ve been asked, by Ami, by Kimiko, by everyone I’ve met in Japan: What’s your novel about? What do you want to know?
I want to know what war is. What happens? Not who fights, or who dies, or how does the amputated family rise from the ashes, but: What is the subtle effect of fear, uncertainty, aggression, starvation? How do the things we can see and name, even when we think we’ve survived them, change the people who we are?
Aunt Molly was an enemy in America. She was a misfit in Japan. Am-e-li-can they sang to her, but it was more
I listen, and murmur comfort about the ear infection. I murmur comfort about his mother’s lengthy visit and some problem I dismiss with the people who live downstairs. I am waiting for the last three days of their life in New York to be thoroughly covered, for my turn to speak, because I finally have some progress to report. I’ve done an interview, with another one lined up. I tell him how odd it was—perhaps
the effect of translation—how the answers felt packaged, pre-prepared. I tell him about Ami, who has agreed to help me with the translations and how we’ve been talking about how to get the real story.
I can hear myself, hear that I am rushing to fill a silence, that I’m reporting, not having a conversation, and that Brian hasn’t spoken. As I wait for his reaction, I find myself talking—I don’t even know about what. I push on, trying not to hear the empty space between us. I want him to know that the trip is not a failure; I am not a failure. He doesn’t have to know I did nothing to set the interview up.
“That’s great,” Brian says. “No apartment?”
The boys have to start their day, he tells me—it’s Saturday morning and time to get going. And it’s late for me, too; time to go to sleep. I dumped too much on Brian just now. I don’t know why my mind wandered so far toward my own preoccupations.
“I miss you,” I say, stopping myself from adding, “Really.” It’s my imagination that he isn’t listening, or his lack of sleep. “Tell the boys I miss them too.”
“W e ate the remnants of dried beans. They used to crush the beans to make oil, and take the meat for food, then they’d take the skin off, crush it together and somehow make it into a round cake. That’s what they were feeding the horses, but they kept some for human consumption, and I remember that was rationed too. We ate those. We would break it into little pieces and put it in water and try to make some kind of soup.
“Pretty soon, there wasn’t even rice, not even brown rice. I remember eating any kind of leaf from any kind of vegetable, and eating ordinary grass. When we ran out of vegetables, everything was eaten. Anything edible.
“Here’s another kind of thing we had to eat. Inago , the small grasshopper. They said it had a lot of protein, nourishment, so we used to capture them in the rice fields. We’d dry it, cook it with shoyu or something just to get the flavor.”
—Seventy-one-year-old male survivor
THREE WOMEN
I MUST BE MORE productive now. I have heard the stories of two survivors; I have notes and tapes and no clear idea of what they mean to me. If I had a plot rather than a vague urgency, rather than a need to know, as in Americans don’t know! , I might be feeling more accomplished. What was it that they did not know exactly; what was this need of mine, which I could taste but not identify? I’ve been asked, by Ami, by Kimiko, by everyone I’ve met in Japan: What’s your novel about? What do you want to know?
I want to know what war is. What happens? Not who fights, or who dies, or how does the amputated family rise from the ashes, but: What is the subtle effect of fear, uncertainty, aggression, starvation? How do the things we can see and name, even when we think we’ve survived them, change the people who we are?
Aunt Molly was an enemy in America. She was a misfit in Japan. Am-e-li-can they sang to her, but it was more
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