Jim was liberated in September 1945 by the North American troops. The first contingent of occupying forces comprised 15,000 soldiers. Thousands more would join them over the next seven years. Jim was about as familiar with the Japanese mind-set as he could be, knowing how impossible that really was, but the Americans arriving in Japan now found themselves confronting a society they’d never before encountered. And they barely knew anything about the country. Sadao Araki, a general in Japan’s imperial army, coined a slogan to describe his pride over the cultural differences between them and the invaders: “The sword is our steel Bible.” Every image, every word, refuted the biblical traditionalism of the occupation forces by a people whose moral code was not circumscribed by sacred scriptures but by an imperial dynasty descended from the sun itself. Every element of the American way of life found its antithesis in Japan. My fathers, my brothers, they didn’t need the words of some prophet when the heat of the sun could be felt across the continents, its power conveyed not through the ears but manifest through the skin itself, temperature as a physical, inarguable fact. The sun, the ball of fire illuminating the earth, belonged by birth to Japan alone, and my country felt itself the rightful proprietor of precepts that should extend, like rays of sunlight, across the globe. While the United States fought to expand its empire, Japan fought for the same cause but with a single difference: the North Americans justified themselves with weapons and speeches, while the Japanese only bore arms, since the fact that the sun rose every day was an authority beyond rhetoric.
Having known Jim, more than anything else having known love with Jim, turned me into a sponge that absorbed every piece of news, every story, every testimony of Japan’s tragedy. Love for a foreigner is what got me interested in my own people’s tragedy, since I’d been so broken by them before I met him that I’d probably have disentangled myself from my own roots, little by little. But once I met Jim, I started paying attention. I remember a government propaganda movie meant to describe the Japanese spirit that was sent to the North Americans in 1945. One of the descriptions had to do with the sun. According to the narration, the emperor, being a direct descendant of the sun, was the most brilliant, the tallest of them all, and his roles included president of the United States, prime minister of Great Britain, pope, archbishop of Canterbury, and head of the Russian Orthodox Church. Everything flowed from and was sustained by Emperor Hirohito. First-floor windows were closed when he walked down the street, the propaganda video explained, to shield houses from the radiation, as of a great star passing by. The difference between the American and the Japanese ways of thinking was evident. Though one thing remained clear: “We must try to understand Japan, since the Japanese and the Americans have been engaged in the closest of all possible relationships: war. And like it or not, we and the Japanese are doomed to remain friends for a long time.”
These videos were meant to prepare the occupation troops for the years ahead. The first North Americans to land in Japan liberated their compatriots from the concentration camps and were horror-stricken at the sight of tortured bodies: the starving, the dying, and the dead. But the reaction was mitigated by what they learned of the suffering the Japanese civilians had endured. There were thousands of orphans wandering around, begging and thieving in the streets of Tokyo and other devastated cities. Food and water were scarce. Some ate sawdust for a daily ration of starch and their protein mainly came, at the behest of the government, from reptiles, rats, and insects. I heard the testimony once of a Japanese woman who lived through the occupation, Kitty Teraki, who said it had been impossible to survive on government rations. A professor tried to disprove this statement by refusing to buy anything on the black market. He died within a short time.
Another witness said the only task the living had for months was to bury the dead. The everlasting act of burial made a deep impression on me then, as it still does now. There are certain accounts one can’t ever forget, whether direct or indirect. I remember a witness’s narration of his feelings in a film recording of the Christmas Eve mass in Nagasaki’s Urakami Cathedral in 1945. Everything around the cathedral had been destruction, wasteland, and death, but the angelic voices that rose inside the cathedral—he used that very word—created a sort of mirage in contrast to the desolation outside. Entering the cathedral, he saw women dressed in kimonos singing “Silent Night.” Urakami, or St. Mary’s, had been built in 1875 thanks to the robust presence of Christians living in the area, and it was totally destroyed by the atomic bomb in Nagasaki. It had originally been built at a time when the persecution of Christians came to an end. The sight of the women’s serene faces, their kimonos as unsoiled as circumstances allowed, and the sound of their voices that Christmas Eve melded two different prototypes of martyr together, according to Daniel Machover: those who lost their lives defending a religion and those who lost it defending an empire. The canticles were hymns of death, beautiful, but hymns of the dead who survived only by remaining dead.
SO I INITIATED MY ADVENTURES, exploring sexual persuasions that might accommodate what were at the time still doubts regarding my identity, when I turned twenty and returned to my city, Hiroshima. The story began with T, whom I met on my second trip to Hiroshima. I started with her because I saw in her asexuality the roots of my own distress—a lack, a void not only of desire but also of allies, of models, of companions. But I had already met N before that, on my first trip. I looked her up because she was a renowned expert in sexual deviations. You see, out of loneliness I was willing to ascribe to myself whatever kind of sexual deviation necessary, as long as it would give me a label, something written, an entry in a dictionary of bizarre creatures. Out of loneliness I treated myself unfairly.
N and I arranged to meet on a bench in front of the sculpture at the center of the park. Everything was green. I was surprised because the last time I was there the trees had been utterly shorn of leaves. The earth’s temperature reached 4,000 degrees Celsius at ground zero. To fully realize the scope of such a massive figure you’ll likely need another point of reference. Let me offer a few statistics for comparison: the sun’s maximum temperature is 5,800 degrees; steel melts at 1,500. So there are your references. My city blistered under temperatures ranging from that of liquid metal in a forge to that of the sun. Like those walking lumps with heads swollen to three times their size, other images populate my memory and the testimonies of others. The people looking skyward when the bomb fell were inevitably described in very precise terms: a verb, to hold; a plural noun, eyes; a phrasal verb, to come out; and a second noun, sockets. When I left the school on the day of the explosion, I remember walking by itinerant men and women holding their eyes with their hands to keep them from sliding out of their sockets. N’s eyes—I thought the first time I saw her—were so black they looked hollow.
N wasn’t a hibakusha. She’d always lived in Hokkaido and wasn’t even aware of the attack when it happened. It took a week for the news to reach her, and since it was impossible to grasp the new weapon’s magnitude, she gave it the same importance as she did one of the combustible bombs that had already been used to destroy 70 percent of Tokyo. Nobody who wasn’t in Hiroshima that day could have conceived of a greater force than what had already decimated 70 percent of the country’s largest city. N listened to my stories, but the truth is, I’d seen something she hadn’t, and it made me nervous to think she’d never be able to grasp the nature of my suffering. I wanted to share my experiences, but at best all she could see was something that wasn’t there anymore, like the light of a dark star. So I provided the same statistics I’ve given to you: over twenty thousand bombs like the one that destroyed Hiroshima are scattered across the planet.
I began by sharing some of the photos I’ve kept over the years. I figured it was as good a place as any. A gentle introduction, easing into the main issue that so many people find paradoxical; they’re always surprised to hear me admit that the bomb actually had a positive effect on my appearance, and that I could no longer recognize m
yself in photographs prior to that Monday, the sixth of August. The bomb—I acknowledged as much to N as well—changed parts of me that I had detested and outlined new features I tried to fix surgically later on, once I had saved enough money. My comments might seem categorical, but the explanation is really quite simple: I was already a victim prior to the attack, and from within that milieu, the bomb alone saw me for what I truly was.
I looked beautiful in the photos. It was probably this appeal that led a visibly stunned N to ask the question she did. She asked if I’d had sex again. I told her I’d been with three men, each of whom were scared off by something they saw. I wasn’t sure because I hadn’t ever seen another female sexual organ for a comparison, but the procedures must not have been as successful as they had promised. From then on, I wouldn’t let anyone see that part of my body, not even the doctors. That’s how I know—even now—that none of my physical afflictions could have originated there. My sexual organs are as strong as an atomic shelter; the problem is that unfortunately, nobody wanted in for a very long time.
I went back to an experience I had one night on a Florida beach. Something happened that made it click from outside of myself, and I could appreciate the disorientation a man must have felt entering me. I reviewed it scene by scene. And narrated it to N in that order:
Me peeing,
Me walking through the desert,
Me squashed under a wheel.
I went out to sit quietly in the sand alone to contemplate the sea as I often did, which is to say to contemplate nothing, to think about nothing. My hands were sunk into the sand, probably probing for dampness on their own. It was through my hands, I think, that I first felt something that pulled me back to consciousness. Something was pushing against my fingers. Then I felt the same pressure against the soles of my feet, now bare. I jumped up. My eyes had adjusted to the dark to the point that I could make out the little mounds of sand around me. At first it looked like little holes were opening into the sand, but then I realized that there were bodies inside the empty holes. Little heads, appendages, beaks, and the shells of thousands of turtles breaking out of the eggs their mothers had laid, now synchronized by the ticking of a common biological clock. I watched them crawling out of myriad nests all around me, circles whose diameter must measure the exact size of an adult turtle. There were so many that they looked like ants. Once they’d emerged from the sand, you could see the whole turtle, though, and they were beautiful, much lovelier than insects. I knew—because I had once been told—that the newborns had to make their way to sea immediately. Unlike us, who are born in the air, they must return to the water. Each one is on its own, without help. They’re born smack into the worst threat of their lives, that space between the nest and water like an open plain full of the kind of predators that work in borderlands. It was such a privilege to be there at that precise moment, and I was eager for them to reach safety.
But instead of scuttling toward the shore, they started moving in the wrong direction, toward the highway. I started to panic. I got closer and could see the trail of slime they leave behind, the viscous material that had protected them inside the egg. I was ready to shoo away any predator—a fox, a dog—with a stiff kick. But how could I save the most important thing of all, that moisture I intuited as being so essential, similar to the lubrication that dried up inside of me before saturating the man who ran away after undressing me, discovering me, seeing what not even I could explain yet. That’s how they were going to cross that dry asphalt on the road separating the beach from the big city. The light pollution wasn’t as bad as it is now. But the artificial lights were overbright in some stretches. The turtles were confusing the lights of the highway with the moonlight, the sound of the cars with the waves, and were swarming in a direction opposite to that which thousands of millions of others, same as them, had respected since the dawn of time. I kept still, watching their fins fumble awkwardly, poor little marine reptiles taking their first steps on land. That’s how they migrated, swimming without water toward the lights of the cars whooshing speedily by in a constant susurrus, unawares of that disoriented army marching against itself. It started to drizzle. I couldn’t stand the sight of it: the tiny turtles testing their new lungs in a puddle of tar, car oil, and water sans salt.
Then a solution occurred to me. If the city could give off artificial light, then why couldn’t I? And from up close. So I turned on my flashlight. I pointed the light at the line of tiny carapaces and then out toward the sea. Over and over again. Nothing happened at first, but a few seconds later the little creatures began following the path of my flashlight, which I was guiding toward that body of liquid that had perpetuated their species from the first instant to the first day, from the day to the year, from the year to an era. I waded into the water up to my knees and watched as they crawled to the shore. They all reached the water safely. From the first turtle that would have been the last to reach the highway, to the last turtle that would have been the first.
I sat back down again to contemplate the sea. But this time I imagined myself crawling toward the highway, drying out, losing all my moisture along the way. I saw myself creeping along hideously, on that beach where nobody would lend a hand, nobody would point a light over my body and tell a man undressing me what I didn’t want to explain, what I couldn’t explain, who entered me not for an explanation, because I had none to give, but to swim in the sea, which is the same as thinking about nothing.
Of course this experience didn’t help N whatsoever. She asked me to please be less allegorical, and said if I really wanted her help, I had to show her what these men were running away from. But that was impossible for me at that time. I wasn’t prepared. I didn’t even want to see it for myself. We said our goodbyes.
For a long time, allegory was the only level I could use to explain what was happening to me. Now, seen from a distance, I’m glad because I think the way I expressed myself then corresponded with a kind of naiveté, or perhaps modesty or bashfulness. I like to remember that I did go through that stage, same as everyone else, surely, and I’m glad in light of things that happened later, because the cruelty would come, and events would rip away the delicacy I used to have when telling my story. I learned to express things blatantly, in literal terms, direct, harsh, and painful. No sea. No water to alleviate the fever.
* * *
Jim often used to say that there is no relationship more intimate among men than that of war. Not love or friendship, no other relationship acknowledges like conflict the stuff that binds men together: knowledge. In war, survival is contingent upon knowing the enemy. The better you know him, the greater your chances for survival. You learn the most intimate things about people in war: what a man is capable of doing to his enemy, what he’s capable of doing to his own people, his father, his son, out of the pain inflicted by the adversary. The outer war always seeps into the inner war, into the home, the heart. Jim once mentioned a prisoner who had hidden a flute in the Burmese jungle when he was interned there. At night they would ask him to camouflage the howling of the people being tortured or the moans of the sick when they grew unbearable. Once one of the girls the camp guards kept to prepare food caught him playing it. Everyone expected her to snitch; it could mean extra rations or an unguent for insect bites. But the girl returned the following night. Silently she approached the flute player and gestured to him to let her touch the flute. She covered the holes with her fingers and blew. With the first sound, she dropped it on the floor and ran away. But she came back the next night and the next. And every time she blew a little longer. It was never melodic, which prompted someone to ask her in her own language what attracted her to the sound. She said she didn’t know, but the flute reminded her of a game her father, now dead, used to oblige her to play, though only wind came out of our friend’s flute. Hearing that, someone snatched the flute from the girl’s mouth and told her not to come back. Some days later she was seen kneeling in the sand, dirtier than usual, hair a mass of tangles, w
ild and unhinged. She was holding a huge lifeless lizard. Her only action was to hold the lizard’s yawning mouth to her lips and carefully blow.
The story of the flute, together with the description of the voices singing “Silent Night” in Uramaki’s cathedral, ties in with a series of associations and a third musical idea that relates to those years of my search for a sexual identity. This third musical connection took me by surprise a few months ago. One of the few times I was able to connect to the internet from the refugee camp, I watched a film a friend had sent in which one of the characters explains nymphomania using Bach’s concept of polyphony. In the same way polyphony made it possible to play and sing several melodic lines simultaneously, a nymphomaniac views all men as one single man. When I was a child and adolescent, I could only vaguely intuit what it was like to recognize the singularity in multiple voices; I hadn’t lived long enough to experience things that might overwhelm my spiritual tranquility. My doubts were always defined by an enigma, a confusion that never seemed to bother my schoolmates those first years, or even beyond the years of adolescence and youth. Everyone around me seemed so radically sure of his or her sexual identity. That’s why I began looking for links that would connect me with other people as undefined as me. And it was in the shape of Japan’s bridges that I found the closest simile to this idea of discerning the singular within a multiplicity. Not the flat bridges, but the arched ones, whose shape allows people to see the landscape from many different points of view as they cross over. So it’s not just a matter of walking from one side to the other, but of seeing how many landscapes can be found in a single one. I wanted a view from the bridge between man and woman, a bridge in whose curvature all genders are encompassed, the infinity of sexes that exist between either side. I’ve walked a long way, I’ve observed much, I’ve tried to understand.
The Story of H Page 7
