A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding Read online

  • • •

  ‘I bring you good news.’ Those were the words the man had used. I looked at the white envelope in front of me, the thick paper, Amaterasu Takahashi printed in neat black ink. The last time I had seen my name written in kanji was eight years after we left Japan, in a letter sent by my former maid, Misaki Goto. Her daughter was getting married, we were invited, she would be so happy if we could make the journey from America to Nagasaki. I was delighted for her but sent my sincere apologies. I hope she understood why I could not go back. Instead I shipped off a painting of the Rocky Mountains, even though Kenzo and I had never visited. We moved from California to Pennsylvania not long after receiving the invitation and Misaki and I lost touch. I had kept in contact with no one else, which forced me to ask the question: who could be writing to me?

  I glanced up to a picture framed in black wood on the wall. The sun had bleached the figures but you could still see Hideo dressed in his school uniform, standing between his parents, Yuko and Shige. On August 9, every year, Kenzo would bring out his best malt, imported from Scotland, in preparation for the day. We would work our way through the bottle, the peat flavour smoky on our tongues, and my husband would create new stories for our dead grandson. Some years he was a sailor, in others a lawyer, or sometimes a poet who lived in the mountains. He was handsome and kind and witty. He had a brood of solid children or a mistress from France. His life was joyful and exotic and full of adventure. The man at my door did not fit this movie-house picture. This was not the ending I wanted for any of us. Here was another monster raised from the rubble of Nagasaki. I did not believe him. This envelope could not contain good news and yet still I walked to the cutlery drawer, retrieved a small knife and returned to my chair. The blade slid too easily through the paper. I took out the note, laid it flat on the table and read the signature. Two words rocketed toward me, only two words, but what words: Natsu Sato. The doctor’s wife. Sweat prickled across my body. I walked to the window, and even though the street was empty, I drew down the blinds. I could have thrown Natsu’s letter in the garbage; I could have turned on the TV too loud and drowned out the possibilities of its contents, but instead I sat back in the kitchen chair and began to read.

  To Amaterasu Takahashi,

  Firstly, I must apologise for the shock of this revelation. The man that you have no doubt just met is your grandson, Hideo Watanabe. I can confirm this. You may have little reason to believe me, but I do not lie. Hideo didn’t die that day, he survived. Is that not marvellous to know? But as you will have seen, he was severely wounded during pikadon. So injured in fact that the authorities could not identify him. He was sent away from the city a year after the end of the war to an orphanage for child victims. This is where my husband found him and where we later discovered who he was. You would have already left for America by this time. It took many years for us to find you. As luck would have it, a former employee of yours, Mrs Goto, read an article about our peace organisation that mentioned Hideo’s birth name. She contacted me and provided an address for you and your husband – an old one, as it turns out. We are trying to locate your whereabouts as I write. I apologise for this delay. I can only imagine the confusion this must be causing you.

  My husband and I decided to adopt Hideo. We brought him back to Nagasaki and he grew into an accomplished man. But I will let him tell you his own story. We are proud of him as I know you will be. Hideo has a package for you. This will help you understand what happened all those years ago, should you wish to know. I have not shown Hideo this package. Whether you do or do not I will leave to your discretion, but I ask that you read the contents first. I’m sure when you have, you will know how best to proceed. I return your grandson to you today not only because I can but also because I want to. This final act is the least I can do after so many years of forced separation. I hope he will bring you as much joy as he has brought happiness to our small family.

  Yours in sincerity,

  Natsu Sato

  There was no date, a message caught in the vacuum of time. I folded the letter up and walked out of the kitchen, down the windowless hall to our bedroom. Kenzo had first taken me to see our home in Chestnut Hill in 1956. ‘I’ve found the perfect spot for us. It’s a commute for me, but it is beautiful, very traditional.’ The Victorian house was painted green with a white wooden porch and set back from a quiet street lined by beeches. As a realtor showed us around, I whispered to my husband that it felt gloomy. He was prepared for my objection. ‘We’ll paint it with strong colours, pale wood, bring the light inside.’ Ever the engineer, he saw brighter possibilities among the shadows.

  He hired carpenters to replace the oak wardrobes in the bedroom with maple. ‘Reminds me of cherrywood,’ Kenzo said, running his hand down a panel. Decorators painted the walls yellow. In Japan this had been the colour of lost love; here it meant the sunshine. I bought a rose-print duvet, pictures of purple mountains for the walls and lilac cotton curtains so flimsy you could see your hands through them. When we were done, we stood in the doorway and appraised our rendition of an American life. Kenzo asked, ‘You like it? It’s much brighter, yes?’ I nodded. He never realised: he was my only sunlight after the war.

  We’d lived in that home together for sixteen years. When Kenzo died in 1972 I’d considered moving, but where? At least here I had a routine of sorts, the territory was known, the boredom familiar. I filled the silence with the noise of wildlife documentaries, rolling news, soaps. Without him, mornings could go by with me just sitting on the couch. At night, I began to drink neat whiskey in growing amounts, the curtains drawn. You live with loneliness long enough and it becomes a kind of company. Besides, those solid walls and polished floorboards contained all I had left of my family. I still saw Kenzo sitting on the couch reading the newspaper, filling in forms or shouting answers at a quiz show, proud of having mastered this foreign language enough to make it almost his own. My resistance to learning English had provoked arguments, but what could he do – force me to read textbooks, march me to classes? ‘Contrary, stubborn, wilfully ignorant,’ he would say in those early years before Chestnut Hill, when we lived north of San Francisco, near Mare Island and close to the shipyard. He’d speak in Japanese and then translate the words into his adopted tongue. ‘Ugly words, ugly language,’ I would reply in English, trying to mimic the accent to prove my point. Kenzo would shake his head and go back to his crossword, which I noted, with cruel satisfaction, he could not do.

  One Christmas a year or so into our American life he gave me a book wrapped in gold tissue. The paper cover was the colour of a red autumn poppy with the texture of frost on a windowpane. The kanji was translated as: An English Dictionary of Japanese Culture. Kenzo smiled at me. ‘I thought this could be a compromise. See, the Japanese is here, and the English is on the other side.’ I flicked through the pages, some decorated with crude black-and-white sketches. I read one of the entries: ‘Wabi: A simple and austere type of beauty. The word is derived from the verb wabu (to lose strength) and the adjective wabishi (lonely). Originally, it meant the misery of living alone away from society. Later, it gained a positive aesthetic meaning: the enjoyment of a quiet, leisurely and carefree life.’ I wrapped the gift back in the sheath of delicate gold and asked him where he had found the book. He reached for another parcel. ‘You can get anything in the USA. You just need to know who to ask.’ I flashed him a sceptical look. ‘Honestly, Ama, sushi, teppanyaki, even shabu-shabu, they’re all here. America is the world.’ He never understood my reasons for not learning the language. This country was shelter from pikadon but it was not home, the people were not my own, I did not want to be close to them.

  • • •

  In the bedroom, I went to Kenzo’s side of the wardrobe, opened the door and eased myself to my knees. We were forty-four and fifty-one years old when we left Japan in 1946, too old for a new life but too broken to remain in the one we had known. We took two trunks stuffed with pictures
, documents and the rags we called clothes, most dyed khaki, the National Defence Colour. Smuggled inside those cases were other mementoes that I stored away without Kenzo’s knowledge. When he died, I moved these few small items to my husband’s side of the cupboard, so he could share them at last. Beneath his clothes, ties and sweaters, I reached into the recesses and pulled out a shoebox, placed Natsu’s letter inside and slid the box to the back wall. I picked up another container, slowly rose to my feet and sat on the edge of the bed. The weight of the contents was heavy on my lap. I ran my hands over the lid, sticky with age, and removed the top. One thought hammered in my mind: why should I trust the wife of Jomei Sato, the man I also blamed for my daughter’s death?

  A Relation

  En: The term is derived from the Buddhist belief that there is a cause to all things. The medium through which a cause brings about an effect is en. Any social relationship starts with and changes with en. It is en that realises the relationship between man and woman, and that between neighbours or business partners. Thus, en creates opportunities and occasions for forming relationships. It very often enables people to carry things on smoothly.

  Nagasaki still feels more real to me than this old Victorian house. The nights spent alone in my bed take me back to our home on the hill with its view of the city growing inland from the narrow entrance of the harbour. Our house stood in a garden of chinaberry, purple maple and blue beech. Two floors of black wood rose up to a triangular roof topped with slate tiles. A carved trim ran down the eaves, and each beam was decorated with metalwork of dragons and ships coated in verdigris. The god of war straddled a wild boar over the main entrance. Inside, the family room was first on the left, lined with tatami mats, the woven rice straw bordered in green and gold silk. Black lacquer chests ran along one side of the room and a square table and four cushions sat in the middle. Scrolls of calligraphy hung on the walls and to the left was the long window overlooking the garden and to the right the alcove that contained the family shrine: a small Buddha, a candlestick, an incense burner, a bell and a mallet. Typical, yes, but ours.

  When I think of our home, I see Yuko sitting in this room, bathed in the glow of rape myrtles, oleanders and canna. She seems a trick of the light, a chimera created by a weak sun on wood panels. I see her pick up a cream tea bowl with her right hand. She turns the bowl clockwise in her outstretched palm. Next she pours hot water from the teapot over the green powdered tea and picks up the bamboo whisk. She stirs until the liquid froths and bubbles like spittlebug foam on grass and then she passes the bowl to me. She is dressed in a kimono the shade of young winter cherries, or camellia, but always red, the colour of happiness, of life, of the womb.

  All I had left of her had been reduced to the contents of a few shoeboxes. As I sat on the bed, the damp of the cardboard nipped my nostrils. I held her notebook in my hand. The green leather binding had disintegrated, and crumbs of paper dust glittered on my fingers. On the inside cover she had written her name in careful script. Yuko Takahashi. Later her surname would be replaced with Watanabe. My daughter’s diaries. I saw her sitting at her desk, writing. I saw the indent of the pen against her middle finger, the delicate kanji of hers on the page. Kenzo had wept with defeat when he found a shopping list she had left on her kitchen table after we went to her home in the days following the bomb. Flour, needle, soap. Three words. Imagine thousands of them. I closed the diary, held the solidity of it to my chest for a moment, and then put it back in the box. Neither of us was ready for the intrusion.

  Next, I opened a folded square of paper. The lines of charcoal were faded but clear enough. The perspective was fine but there was something awkward in the composition, as if the artist had been trying to cram too much detail into the space. On the bottom right of the sketch, Yuko had written the place and date: Iōjima, August 22, 1936.

  The summer had been a fierce one. The humidity stained everyone’s clothes as if it was rain and the air burnt deep into lungs. I could feel that heat as I looked at the contours of the face before me, the high cheekbones, the neat moustache, that mole. I could see the charcoal smudged between Yuko’s fingertips; I could picture the sheen of sweat as she worked; I could feel her longing. His expression was as unfathomable as it had always been. I placed the sketch face down. I did not want to think of Jomei Sato. I did not want to remember him, or that brutal summer, or that last morning all those years later.

  New unanswered fears gripped me. How had Hideo survived? Kenzo and I looked for him; we were sure pikadon took him. How to face the possibility that he might have been alive all those years since? And if that were true, how had the doctor and his wife managed to adopt him? This could be no coincidence. Perhaps the man on my doorstep was another victim of the doctor’s, or an accomplice. How pathetic of Sato to wait this long to take revenge. No punishment could match all the years lived since that summer, that morning, that minute.

  Treasure of Children

  Kodakara: As an eighth-century Japanese poet says, there is no treasure more precious than children. According to Japanese folk beliefs, children are Heaven’s gifts, and those under seven years of age deserve special attention. These beliefs have had a deep influence on child-rearing, resulting in a close contact between mother and child.

  That last morning the mist hung low over the two valleys and a spur of mountain poked through the clouds. Kenzo had collected Hideo from school the previous afternoon and brought him to our house so that Yuko could work an early shift at the hospital. She had agreed to meet me at Urakami Cathedral during her break. I knew this meant she had reached her decision, and I worried about what I might have to do to ensure it was the right one.

  I went to the bedroom where she had slept as a child. Hideo was lying beneath the yellow butterflies Yuko had drawn on the wall when she was not much older than him. They flew from the ground up to the window. His mouth was open, his arms wide, as if crucified. He seemed so at peace, all the worries of an absent father, air raids, hunger and the closeness of the war kept at bay in that moment before waking. A bamboo box was open by the side of his mattress. He had filled it with his identity tag, address and blood type, a knife, a magnifying glass and cotton bandages. I knelt by his futon and stroked his hair the way I had done when Yuko was a child until he woke up, an anxious smile on his face. I kissed him on the forehead as a wave of pure love washed over me for this boy, so small, so precious, so vulnerable. Awake he carried that shy, self-conscious bearing of Shige’s. I watched him get dressed in his school uniform, frayed and faded. Yuko had insisted on keeping her clothing rations for an emergency. I made his breakfast of rice and tea, recycled from dried leaves, and we left the house. Cicadas throbbed through the undergrowth in the garden. Next to a chinaberry sapling, plump figs were beginning to darken and the air carried their summer scent. As we neared the gate Hideo spotted a green praying mantis on a bird table and we watched it eat a white moth, which was trapped in its spiked legs. Hideo glanced at me. ‘Is the moth in pain? Can we save it?’ I told him this was nature’s way. There were hunters and prey but we were top of the food chain and he should not worry. I remembered something I had been told. ‘Do you know that the female praying mantis sometimes eats the male after they have mated?’

  He looked confused. ‘What does mated mean?’

  I blushed. ‘Never mind, we should get going. We don’t want to be late for school.’

  Hideo smiled, hopeful. ‘Can we keep her? As a pet.’

  ‘She’s better out here, free, don’t you think?’

  He considered this and then took my hand in his own.

  Our journey was no different to the others we had made during those days of ‘wartime emergency’. We passed the soba store as the owner laid out his meagre daily supply on bamboo racks. The tempura shop next door had been turned into a collection point for any remaining metal we could forage from our homes. Kenzo had long ago sold what gold we had to the government and donated gardening
tools, ceremonial swords, copper pots, buttons from our clothes, even the grate of our hearth. Outside the shop the women’s association had left a box of cloth strips, which would be sent to our soldiers abroad. Each one had the word ‘strength’ printed on them one thousand times. Kenzo would watch me at night as I worked on my own contributions and shake his head. ‘Trust me, those will do no good.’ He would never admit so outside our home, but he believed the war was lost. Still he went to work, still I made my senninriki, still I believed somehow our family would be fine.

  Hideo and I waited for a street car and then pushed our way onto the crammed carriage next to young women dressed in their loose-fitting monpe trousers and white shirts. They would be heading to the locomotive depots, the railroad stations, shipping companies and the munitions factories. Kenzo had admired their hard work but when students in the last year of elementary school were recruited to help at similar labour units, he asked in despair, ‘When will this stop?’

  My grandson’s palm was clasped in mine and his school shirt was damp with sweat. The day would be another hot, humid one. I pointed at the window. We watched members of the Nagasaki Fortress Defence Unit march alongside the tram tracks in uniforms that hung from them. Many no longer drilled with guns but bamboo poles. Their weapons had been sent to those on the front lines. A couple of nights earlier my women’s association had organised a national defence evening where similar spears were handed out. We wrapped sashes across our chests and tied hachimaki to our heads. Then we picked up our weapons and ran toward life-size effigies of Roosevelt and Churchill as we shouted, ‘Annihilate America! Annihilate England!’ The sight was ludicrous, but I could not speak such treachery. We had to be seen to be loyal among those who still were. Days earlier, as I sat in the cinema, I watched police arrest a man in the theatre for not taking his hat off when the Emperor appeared on the screen. Better to be obedient and wary.