A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding

by Jackie Copleton

  Conjecture

  Sasshi: Loosely this can be translated as ‘understanding’, ‘sensibility’, ‘consideration’. It is an important idea in interpersonal relationships in Japan. According to the concept of modesty and sincerity that Japanese people esteem, direct self-expression is frowned upon. People are expected to guess what others intend to say. If they are not perceptive enough and dare to ask for information left unsaid, then they are branded as rude.

  The sky was still dark when I rose and wrapped one of Kenzo’s brown woollen cardigans over my crumpled clothes. A mug of coffee steamed in the cold air as I went through to the living room. The lamp had been left on all night, a comfort in the dark. The world outside seemed blurred, coated in frost. These four walls, the twelve black frames, the brown package were all that mattered. When the man had left the night before I had stared at that envelope as I finished the bottle, but I knew even through the stew of alcohol that a clear head would be needed. My hands shook as I broke the seal. Inside someone had bundled letters together and secured them with elastic bands. I pulled one batch out and checked the seals. Each one had been marked with a red hanko: Jomei Sato. I sat back, sickened and confused. The doctor would not write to me. We had left no possibility for further communication.

  I picked up the first envelope from the pile, the glue so old the seal came apart with the lightest of effort. A date, August 9, 1946 and her name: Yuko. I cried out in that empty room. What was this? Why would Sato write to my daughter a year after her death? He knew she had been killed. I had told him. I opened more of the letters, my hands shaking. Every year on August 9 he had written her a letter. Why torment me with this fantasy correspondence? Why now when I no longer had the strength to fight him? And what was Natsu’s involvement in this? I hated that he was in control again but what could I do other than pick up that first letter. The doctor’s voice echoed through the years and the room filled with his low, assured delivery.

  So you want to know what I did during the days after the bomb? Surely the answer is obvious. I looked for you, whenever I could, but there were so many injured people that needed what little help I could offer. I was posted to Fukuya; the department store had been turned into a makeshift hospital, its floor slippery with blood. The rooms filled up with creatures barely human, their skin black as charcoal, metal, glass and wood embedded so deep into flesh, the shards rattled in lungs. I felt more like a mortician than a doctor, administering morphine to the dying only when it could be spared. I could not bear to think you were among the wounded. I went to the relief centres: Urakami First Hospital, Shinkozen school and Ibinokuchi police station, hoping, like me, you were tending patients. Nothing. I went to the temporary town hall again and again to see if there had been reports of you, but always there was nothing. Photographs and addresses had been posted across walls and fences. I scoured them for information but you had vanished. I searched your home. I even spoke to your mother. That’s how desperate I was. She said you and Hideo were dead. I told her I did not believe her. She said why should you be saved with so many others lost? The world did not owe you sanctuary. She said I had killed you; I had placed you in the path of pikadon. I refused to believe you were dead, even though the city was all the evidence anyone needed. So many places gone: the municipal office, the district court, the prison, the water building, the medical college hospital, but I could not let the possibility of you go. If I had survived, why not you? This made no sense to me.

  As the contagion spread, we thought we were dealing with dysentery. We ran crude experiments on how to contain the sickness. Every day I checked the arrivals to see whether you were among them. I tried my best for them because I thought that one day you might be there. And so when I injected them with glucose or calcium chloride, or gave them vitamins or fresh blood, I did so for you. I watched them and learned the signs of coming death: the hair, the black spots, the bleeding gums, the convulsions, and I feared that somewhere this might be happening to you.

  I haven’t found you but I haven’t given up on you either. Know that. I am always searching and hoping that you might return. Even now, when I catch sight of a certain woman in the street, I find myself following her, waiting until she turns around so that I can see your face again. No human bones to find, no tombstone to visit, nothing to prove you are dead but the constancy of your absence and my love.

  I thought I could smell jasmine. I lifted the letter to my nose but the scent was just a vapour of memory. There had been a vase of flowers in my room the day Sato came to our home. Kenzo was out looking for Hideo and Yuko. I was too unwell to go with him. My husband called me his miracle. So many taken, not by the executioners’ flames, but by the sickness carried in the air. I must have caught something of the poison but not enough. Misaki had pulled my soiled nightdress off me to wash my body. I was too sickly to be embarrassed by my nakedness. She was running a wet, cool compress down my arm when she stopped, alerted by some noise. She stood up and called out, ‘Mr Takahashi?’ but there was no reply. She pulled up a bedsheet so that I was covered. ‘Who’s there?’ Footsteps came fast up the stairs and along the hall landing and by the time she reached the open doorway, Sato was pushing past her. She clung onto his arm. ‘Out, how dare you, out.’ He was still wearing his doctor’s coat. He looked at me, eyes pleading. His voice caught when he said, ‘Please tell me she is alive.’ Misaki turned to me. ‘I’ll go and get help.’ I looked at his face, pale and unshaven, with dark shadows carved below his eyes, and I told her I was fine. ‘Sato, I’ll tell you what I know but will you give me a minute before we talk?’ He seemed paralysed for a few seconds but then left the room. Misaki helped me pull on a fresh nightdress before disappearing downstairs. I watched him enter the room, dazed with fever and his presence. I hated that he would see me this weak. How dare he bring his grief to our house uninvited. Who was he to mourn her here? Given our last words spoken before pikadon, he must have been wretched to seek me out.

  He sat on the window seat and rested his head in his hands. ‘Tell me she’s alive and then I’ll go.’ Maybe I felt a tremor of sympathy for him then. To soothe his pain would ease my own, but he had asked the impossible, the one confirmation I could not give him. I told him the small nails of facts I held, hammered each one into a coffin we would never need and she would never be contained by. Yuko had gone to the cathedral where we had planned to meet. I had been delayed. She never returned home. Neither did Hideo. What more was there to tell him? The doctor had seen the city, the air so thick with the dead you could taste the dust of them. But Sato rejected what he could not bear to be true. He said Yuko couldn’t be gone; she would be helping survivors, or maybe she was sick in some medical centre, or maybe she had been taken out of the city. He offered so many possibilities. I had thought of them all. How could I tell him I knew she was dead because I felt the void of her, a vacuum inside me where a mother carries the soul of her offspring? Sometimes I would feel her, like a ghost limb that causes pain despite its amputation, but I knew this was a trick of the mind. She was dead, and so was her son.

  August 9, 1947. In the next letter Sato wrote that the December before he had taken up a position at the Holy Mother of Immaculate Conception Order Convalescent Centre for Children of the A-bomb on Fukue Island, sixty miles from Nagasaki. The home was opened six months after pikadon and filled with eighty orphans and children who could not be reunited with their families. Church collections mostly paid for its upkeep, along with a generous donation from the women of the Church of First Friendship Institutional Baptists in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The centre was overseen by the Knights of the Holy Mother and Sato had taken the job for at least a year. He planned to visit the orphanage for extended visits while continuing research work in Nagasaki.

  He wrote that his first approach to the house would have appealed to Yuko’s artistic eye with ‘its bare trees coated in hoarfrost, tips tinged orange by the winter sun’. A gravel walkway led past a fountain of leapin
g carp frozen in white marble and the path then cut the lawn into halves, which were bordered with frost-ravaged rose bushes, their brown flowers rotten on the stem. Built in the European tradition, the building had three floors, topped with a slate roof. Someone had begun to repaint the timber frame, which was covered in peeling, grey paint save for this square of white underneath one of the ground-floor windows. A veranda ran the length of the front and a trellis of ivy covered most of the right-hand side of the house.

  The inside of the home was all dark halls and low lamps that led to eight bedrooms, several living rooms and serving quarters. The nuns lived on the upper floor, with the older children. The second floor was for the younger charges, and the two teachers resided in the summer house next to a pond, suffocated with red algal bloom. Many of the children had been injured by the bomb and their needs were such that the scullery in the basement functioned as a medical ward. That was where Sato could be found. He arrived at lunchtime and the Mother Superior took him to the refectory. The children sat in silent rows, eating overcooked udon from chipped bowls. One boy in particular had caught his attention, or rather, his burns had.

  I have seen severe injuries before, but his are not for the faint of heart. The nuns call him Ko. An optimistic name for the boy: how can he represent happiness, light and peace? He has not spoken since his arrival. His muteness is not a physical impediment, I am sure. Pikadon has left its mark, not just in broken limbs and burnt flesh, but hidden in bones and muscles and fibres and young minds. I suspect I have a lifetime’s work of observations and medical studies to undertake. And you, Yuko, are the one who drives me on. I still cannot believe you are gone. If I had seen your body or held you one last time, or I could say here is where my Yuko is buried, would that have helped? The love remains; it never dies. It still grows until some nights I wonder if I can stand the pain. So many questions that can never be reconciled but this is the one that plagues me most: why would your god take you and leave me in this world?

  I folded the letter up and placed it back in its envelope. Sato was doing what so many of us had done; he was mourning a loss that could never be regained, but his was a more dangerous kind of grief; he was trying to keep Yuko alive, somehow, in these letters. Wishful thinking alone cannot resurrect the dead. Neither can medicine. Flesh decays or burns in an instant; either way, we are no more. Why would Yuko be the exception?

  His years after the war were marked by study and experiments, analysis and conjecture. The Sato I had known had not been so dedicated to his profession. He had worn the uniform of a doctor lightly when we first met. Pikadon had sharpened his focus, honed the skills he had acquired too easily in his youth. Twenty-four of the children required ongoing medical care, mostly for burns and compression wounds that had not healed satisfactorily. In 1948, he wrote:

  The job is lonely. I imagine us working together. I imagine you sitting beside me, annotating notes or differentiating between contact and flame burns. I see us mapping out the fissures of damaged skin to explain the topography of the bomb. I have pinned a map of Nagasaki on the wall of my sleeping quarters. My information is crude and unconfirmed, half-guessed statistics, but I record them on paper and add them to my lists.

  Estimates of the casualty numbers had been logged somewhere but Sato had no access to them. The closest he came was a visit from a group of American doctors, engineers and scientists who came to the hospital where he worked that first September. They shook his hand, walked around the beds of those yet to die, took notes and photographs, asked to see medical records while interpreters translated what they read. When Sato asked if these experts from the West had a cure for the sickness they had unleashed, they said nothing. The precious cargo of information they took with them was censored by the American authorities, sent to government departments and stored away in files. Sato had written to the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission for help accessing official statistics and heard nothing back. He tried to recall the stories of the dying patients in their hospital beds, and the clues they provided. He saw first-hand how radiation destroyed the body’s defensive mechanism and its legions of cells and how this correlated to the prevalence of infection, the poor repair, the high mortality rates.

  When he called the children into his ward, while he tended healing wounds or checked old scars, he was looking for signs of long-term contamination, of diseases yet to be detected but carried in arteries and bones. The nuns did not know but he tested for cancers in the lungs, thyroid and blood. He was trying to chart the course of this sickness through the evidence it left behind. Two toddlers abandoned by their families were crucial: Izumi and Kasumi, aged thirty-two and thirty-six months. He measured their heads and limbs; he checked their muscle tone and their facial features, the slope of their forehead, the distance between their eyes; he took pictures of their limbs and their faces. His observations, he believed, suggested that both girls showed signs of abnormal growth of the brain. Those two babies were not the only ones to be poisoned in their mothers’ bellies that day. He was not compiling a report for where pikadon had been but where it might take us. This was what kept Sato on the island; he was looking for things that could not always be seen. He told Yuko he had begun to write a book, which he said would chart the medical conditions of foetuses contaminated by radiation in the womb.

  Come 1949, the routine of his life was ‘reassuringly uneventful’. He rose early most mornings and walked through the grounds, past a patch of trees where dolls made by the children hung from creaking branches. These dolls were little more than balls wrapped in squares of cotton with faded outlines of faces swinging in the breeze, ‘as the trees scratch out a morning lullaby. See what a poet you still make me?’ He would continue down to the shore to watch the sun rise and seep colour back into the island before he returned for morning surgery. In the afternoon, he worked on his research and after an evening meal, while the nuns fell to their knees in contemplation, he wrote up more notes in his room.

  Life at the orphanage may be without much drama but we had one incident of note a couple of months ago. During one of my morning walks, I found the boy Ko standing near the pond, naked. He was wet, as if he had swum in the water, which was still congested from the disease that had killed all the fish. The red slime coated his skin. I called out his name and he turned to me and pointed at the water. I asked him, ‘I don’t understand. What’s wrong, Ko?’ He started to cry. ‘What is it, Ko? Where are your clothes?’ He looked at the water once more. ‘I don’t understand, Ko.’ He opened his mouth and then he did something extraordinary: he spoke. His voice was high-pitched. It belonged to a boy younger than his years. ‘Miki is in the water. Please help her.’ I asked who she was. ‘My friend.’ I had heard of no Miki. He grew agitated. ‘Help her, help her.’ I told him to wait and I went to fetch the caretaker. We dredged the pond that morning and he watched us, wrapped in a blanket, Sister Abe by his side. Ko shivered as he watched the caretaker and his son pull the empty dragnets into the boat. I told him how sorry I was but no one was there. He shook his head, more angry than sad. ‘Miki is in the water.’ Sister Abe put her arms around his shoulders. ‘Ko, there is no Miki. No one of that name lives with us.’ He drew still at this and the nun held his chin, made him look her in the eyes. ‘You’re speaking, Ko.’ The boy looked at her, cowed. ‘My name isn’t Ko.’ She ran a finger over his face. ‘Who are you then?’ He looked at that dead pond. ‘Miki.’ And then he stopped talking again.

  What to say of Ko? He is my most regular visitor and, with the exception of the two toddler girls, my most curious case. We sit in genial silence as I check his burns and fill out my forms. A surgeon from America has performed some plastic surgery on him and the doctor is keen that I report on the healing process. There is talk of more procedures taking place, perhaps in the US, although the logistics involved make that difficult. Ko’s file is thick with medical assessments. The first notes were made when he was admitted to Nagasaki Commercial College on August
18. The burns are not those from the thermal rays of the explosion but some localised fire. Still, his survival is a rare thing. Ninety per cent of survivors exposed to the blast who I saw died by the fortieth day. Think of the care available to him. There was no zinc oxide oil; we used whatever we could get our hands on to treat burns: rapeseed oil, cooking oil, castor oil, even machine oil. The same thing when it came to disinfecting the burns. We used what we could find: iodine tincture, mercurochrome, Rivanol, boric acid solution. His life was immeasurably improved by the American doctor, that is for sure, but we humans, we do so like to create our Frankenstein monsters.

  I can only imagine who this Miki might be. A lost sibling, an imaginary friend, maybe even the thing the boy might like to be. Days later, I was sitting on a bench in the orphanage’s front garden. Children were playing catch on the lawn and Sister Abe and Ko were sitting on the veranda, shaded from the sun. Ko watched the other youngsters run around the grass and then he looked beyond them, down the gravel path. I followed his gaze but could see nothing save for the usual flowers, bushes and the gate. He turned to the nun and I saw his mouth move and then she smiled and held his hand.

  His name is Hideo. He remembers little else at the moment, not the name of his parents, where he lived, the school he attended. The Mother Superior reported the scant information back to the head office in Nagasaki. They said they would check the missing persons register and various other records for any possible candidates but no one could see a happy ending to this search. We don’t even know how many people were in the city at the time. Maybe 240,000, maybe more, maybe less. How many Hideos, of Ko’s estimated age at the time of pikadon, were registered missing and how many parents left alive to find them? Eight weeks later I learned the answer: twenty-three.