by Lois Lowry
still shimmered with death,
and gone north with his
mother and sister.
They would find their way
to the city of Tokyo,
to the area called Shibuya,
and begin a new life there.
They would start again.
The war had ended.
Bon Odori
In summer, during Obon Festival,
the drumming began, and chanting.
I watched everyone—
grandparents, children—
moving, circling,
in the Bon Odori dance.
From the shadows
where I watched,
my bike against a tree,
I moved my arms as they did:
up, and forward, and then:
Clap. Clap. Pause. And: Clap.
Gracefully they moved,
honoring their ancestors.
So did I.
Hibakusha
In summer I went to the Inland Sea
and saw a hill with a stunted tree.
The jima—islands—rose with grace,
but wind misshaped things in this place.
Not far from the island where I stood,
where the tree displayed its twisted wood,
a ruined city curved the shore,
its name synonymous with war:
Hiroshima
Like wind-warped pine, its people, too,
were twisted, broken, scarred, askew.
But like the trees, they lived. They thrived.
Their name means “those who have survived":
Hibakusha
Invisible
Back in Pennsylvania, where I had lived,
there was a comic book
called Invisible Scarlet O’Neil.
I loved Scarlet. She could magically
make herself invisible.
And now: I could too.
I rode my green bike
through the busy streets of Shibuya,
where children ran and laughed,
babies cried, dogs barked,
shopkeepers chattered and called, and
oxen lumbered through the streets
pulling carts of fertilizer.
And I watched and listened,
feeling invisible
on my green bike,
until the day that a woman
touched my hair and spoke.
The Word For “Hate”
I rode the green bike home that day,
humiliated. I told the maids—
Ritsuko, Teruko, Aiko—
that a woman had touched my hair
and said she hated me.
They were shocked.
What word?
I repeated the word that meant “hate.”
“Kirai,” I told them.
They whispered among themselves.
Then they asked:
Maybe “kirei”?
Well, maybe.
Isn’t it the same word?
They laughed. No. Not at all.
She said you were pretty.
Such a simple shift of sound!
My mistake was so profound:
When the woman touched my hair
(though I’d pretended not to care),
I’d felt suffused by shame
and guilt. Reproach. And blame.
Girl on a Bike
Beside a school I paused one day
and watched some children run and play.
We were curious. I know that’s true.
Their eyes were dark and mine were blue.
I braked my bike and watched them there.
I saw them eye my pale blond hair.
They looked at me, and I at them. So why
were we so silent: mute and shy?
I smiled before I rode away
but never met Koichi Seii
until so many years went by
that he was gray-haired; so was I.
I’d lived in his country, then.
And now he’d moved to mine, so when
we met (his name was Allen now),
we mused and pondered how
from our horizons we had viewed
a war begin, a war conclude.
We were young. We were alike.
Boy in a schoolyard. Girl on a bike.
Gaijin
Aoyama Gakuin, not far away,
was where I stopped my bike that day,
as on its grounds Koichi played
and watched me. Was he afraid?
Gakuin meant school. I knew words now,
in Japanese, especially how
tomodachi was the word for “friend.” Why
did it seem wrong for us to try
for friendship? Was it just too soon?
I pedaled home that afternoon
feeling gaijin: foreign, weird,
feeling different, feeling feared.
Now
I stand beside Japanese tourists
looking down at the Arizona.
They look stricken. They bow.
Their bows are deep.
From the dark split hull below,
oil still bubbles to the surface
as if she breathes.
As if asleep.
In Hiroshima,
at the memorial there,
in front of the blackened tricycle,
I too bow. I weep.
Tomodachi
triolet
We could not be friends. Not then. Not yet.
Until the cloud dispersed and cleared,
we needed time to mend, forget.
We could not be friends. Not then. Not yet.
Till years had passed, until we met
and understood the things we’d feared,
we could not be friends. Not then. Not yet.
Until the cloud dispersed and cleared.
Author’s Note
When I was a child, in the days when there was no television, it was always a treat when we could talk Daddy into setting up the projector and screen and showing the home movies one more time. Mother would darken the room, and we watched the so-familiar scenes: me learning to walk; our grandmother arriving to visit us in Hawaii and smiling as leis of flowers were heaped around her neck; my sister, Helen, in her Halloween clown costume; me again, on the beach now with a little shovel; and finally, the two of us, barefoot, watering Mother’s flowers in the garden.
When I was eleven, we moved to Tokyo and the home movies went into storage along with our furniture. Time passed, and now I was a teenager in New York. It was the fifties. My family got a television, and I don’t think we ever looked at Dad’s movies again. Until . . .
It was 1980. Dad was getting old now and living with my mother in Virginia. I lived in Boston, and one time when I visited my parents, Dad showed me the circular metal containers that held those old bits of my early childhood and mused that he probably should throw the deteriorating films away.
But instead I took them back to Boston with me and found someone who could save them to a videotape. I had recently bought a VCR—something that was quite new at the time—and one night, with company there, I slipped the tape into the VCR and we watched the scenes from my childhood. There was Helen in her clown suit again. I played once more on the beach at Waikiki, and the breeze lifted my sun hat as I grabbed at it, laughing. Then, barefoot, we began to water our mother’s flowers one more time.
“Wait,” my friend John said suddenly. “Pause it and go back to the beach scene.”
I did so. John was a Boston lawyer, but he was an Annapolis graduate and had had a previous career as the captain of a nuclear submarine. He leaned forward as we watched the beach scene again. Then he said, “Look on the horizon. That’s the Arizona.”
The room of people fell silent because now we were no longer watching a small story of a little girl playing with a shovel in 1940. We were watching a huge piece of history. The Arizona carried 1,200 men. Almost
all of them would soon be dead.
I am still haunted by that. By the fact that I had giggled and scampered in the sand on that day, while in the background—on the horizon—the doomed young men had moved slowly across the landscape that was my life as well as theirs.
In 1994 I met the brilliant and gifted illustrator Allen Say. We had breakfast together during a library convention in Miami and discovered that not only were we born the same year (You’re much older, Allen said smugly. By five months, I scoffed), but that we had lived near each other in Tokyo when we were children, in the days when he was still Koichi Seii, whose family had fled southern Japan in 1945. Amazingly, he remembered that a girl on a green bike had once paused and watched him and his classmates on their school playground in Shibuya.
“Me,” I confessed.
“You,” he acknowledged, laughing.
* * *
That same year, I took my eleven-year-old grandson, Jamie, to Hawaii for a vacation, just the two of us. I showed him the hospital where I’d been born and the place where my family had lived just outside of Honolulu. Then we went to Pearl Harbor.
It was on the USS Arizona Memorial, as we stood in the midst of a hushed crowd, that something caught our attention. In front of the engraved list of names—those who had died, those who still lay below us on the sunken vessel—was a small glass jar containing a few flowers. A note propped beside it said For my grandpa and followed that message with a name. Jamie and I read the name, then found it in the list of doomed men. We did the math, whispering to each other. That young sailor had left a child, we realized. The child had grown up and had a child of his own. That child had left these flowers for the grandfather he had never had a chance to meet.
My grandson and I moved to the side and stood there looking at the sea, almost overwhelmed by the way history had become real, and watching the slow formation of oily bubbles that still, after so many years, oozed their way to the surface.
* * *
It has taken many years for me to put these things together, to try to find some meaning in the way lives intersect—or how they fail to. I guess the important thing is also the simplest: to acknowledge our connectedness on this earth, to bow our heads when we see a scorched tricycle or a child’s message to his lost grandpa, and to honor the past by making silent promises to our fellow humans that we will work for a better and more peaceful future.
Bibliography
Hersey, John. Hiroshima. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.
Kent, Molly. USS Arizona’s Last Band: The History of U.S. Navy Band Number 22. Kansas City, KS: Silent Song Publishing, 1996.
Sekimori, Gaynor, trans. Hibakusha: Survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. First English edition. Tokyo: Kosei Publishing Company, 1986.
Simpson, MacKinnon. USS Arizona: Warship, Tomb, Monument. Honolulu: Bess Press, 2008.
Thomas, Gordon, and Max Morgan Witts. Enola Gay: The Bombing of Hiroshima. Old Saybrook, CT: Konecky & Konecky, 1977.
Tibbets, Paul W Flight of the Enola Gay. Buckeye Aviation Book Co, 1989.
Visit hmhbooks.com to find more books by Lois Lowry.
About the Author
LOIS LOWRY lived in many places growing up, including Hawaii and Japan during the years around World War II, and now lives in Maine. She is the author of more than forty books for children and young adults, including two Newbery Medal winners, Number the Stars and The Giver.
Visit her at loislowry.com
About the Illustrator
KENARD PAK has worked at DreamWorks Animation and Walt Disney Feature Animation. An SCBWI Golden Kite Award winner, he has illustrated many books for children such as Have You Heard the Nesting Bird? by Rita Gray and The Dinner That Cooked Itself by J. C. Hsyu. He is the author/illustrator of Goodbye Summer, Hello Autumn and Goodbye Autumn, Hello Winter.
Visit Kenard at pandagun.com
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