Read Online Hiroshima in the Morning by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto - Free Book Online Page A

than that, more than children in the street flinging stones at her ankles. She was outside their suffering. Outside her own.
    And there were others: women whose names I came across, Japanese Americans who found themselves in Japan for one reason or another during the war. One of them was a “girl monitor,” drafted by the Japanese government to translate Allied messages intercepted in the Pacific. Another was a young mother who was sent back during the war on an
exchange ship, pulled from the internment camps, reaching Hiroshima just before the bomb. I found them in the books I read in the days before my second visit to Aunty Molly, written by a professor at a University in Tokyo. “Were we the enemy?” the title asked, and now I realize this is my central question. My new book is also about identity and survival.
    I have my answers ready now, or rather my questions: What does a person do in the face of rejection? Discarded by two countries, abandoned by family, what behavior is justified to save yourself? And, most importantly, when you are being torn in two directions, how do you decide who you are and where you belong? Kimiko is going to call the director of the Peace Museum and she wants to know what to tell him about my research. But when I try to communicate this new understanding of my novel to her, it seems too odd.
    “These women,” she says. “What are their names? There might be a record of them in the museum archives.”
    After a brief search, I have them. “Well, my aunt, of course. And here are two others: Yuko Okazaki and Irene Saeki.”
    “Who are these women again, what did they do?”
    I go over the few details I have, pairing stories with each name.
    “All right, then. I will speak to him about these people and we will see.”

MAGIC
    Anything and everything can happen now—can materialize spontaneously any time the telephone rings in Japan.
    Today I have a new home; a grand place by Hiroshima standards with plastic floors in the living area, and two six-mat tatami rooms with sliding glass doors onto a balcony that looks out over the Otagawa, one of Hiroshima’s six rivers. The river is lined with cherry trees—it’s fairly wide and muddy green and tidal. At certain times of the day, children can play sand baseball in the river bed. I can see the city center from my balcony, and, once I get a bicycle, which Kimiko has promised to lend me, it will be no more than a ten-minute ride to wherever I want to go.
    Kimiko found it for me; it is right across the river from her house. She filled it with furniture and bedding, dishes and a desk all loaned by people I don’t know, people I will never meet. In addition to a full set of necessary furniture, I’ve been given a microwave oven that doubles as a toaster, an electric wok for making shabu-shabu, three toothbrushes, six bars of soap, and five medium-sized plastic bowls and buckets, all of which are for washing myself before I take a bath. And now, she is whirling in the center of the floor making magic: transformed from stern to child-like, from elegant dress to multi-patterned moving clothes, from “perhaps, we will see” to “get out of the way so they can bring it
through the door.” It being a washing machine, a refrigerator, an air-conditioner.
    Kimiko has given me a place for my family when they arrive, a new home. Everything that has walked though her door is a gift to her—for who am I? She has tested her place in the fabric and found thick layers of friendship, and many people who are delighted to return her favors. I’m not the first person she’s been so generous with—Kimiko works regularly into the single digits of the morning for clients, colleagues, and friends—and this is her thanks: a new life for me.
     
    I HAVE BEEN IN HIROSHIMA for exactly fifteen days and at last the ground is under my feet. If it has not been as slow a start as I imagined, it has felt eternal. Tonight, I’ll be sleeping on the floor on a futon