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

girl—skirt flying, dancing with tumbleweeds—is not my mother, not exactly. She is my first character from my first book.
    My mother could not remember the camps, so I invented them for her. That’s how my first novel began. I made them up, pulling from a mixed bag of the photographs that could be taken, from the questions that the man with the yearbook at the internment camp “reunion” had asked, the man who wandered through the community center full of former internees eating home lunches of sushi rice and teriyaki, searching for anyone in the room who was three when he was three in camp, who might have been in a nearby block, who might have been his friend.
    I pulled from dreams.
    I created the children first—this little boy, the little girl who was his friend—and even while I was doing interviews, gathering the details of how the brick floors in the barracks had to be shellacked to keep the dirt from rising, I must have known I wasn’t dreaming up a “book about the internment.” Write a potboiler, a kindly, grandfatherly man had told me in passing, in the halls of one of the elder homes I visited to do my interviews. That’s what people want to read. The facts are boring. His advice stuck, though I was never aware of following it. I began to fictionalize, to trace family ties that could never have existed but could still be realized and, more than that, could be made so persuasive
that my mother could fill in her past with them, tucking her adopted life into bed each night without acknowledging its true parentage until it was hers by nurture. I recreated my mother’s memories before she began to lose her own, and now she too cannot remember what is real. I have been left with fragments of my own creation, with fictions, and now that I am in Japan, I’m discovering new creations and new memories of my mother—older, different—of times with her that I never experienced.
    Like my mother as America’s sweetheart.
    Like my mother standing beside me, gazing at the A-bomb Dome. More a presence than a physical form, since I know she isn’t truly there, but still real enough in my mind and the edge of my sight: a ruffle of my nerve endings as I find myself being pointed toward a thin white crane, stepping out from behind a crumbling wall to pose on one foot before disappearing again in the field of rubble.
     
    WRITING IS UNCHARTED TERRITORY. It is a dream state, stop and start; it is a tangle of words and emotions that may not yield a single page at the end of a day. People ask me: What is your book about? What do you want to know? and I always answer, even though I know the answers will change. My first novel was not, in the end, written just because my mother was too young to remember the internment; it was not, as I would often say, merely about family secrets and splintered lives. When I stopped trying to verify the facts and started using them to open my imagination, my story began to circle in on motherhood, and on all the terrible
things a mother and child can do to each other. And in that very unconscious preoccupation, which I would have put a halt to had I become aware of it, the novel was about me.
    For as long as I can remember, I never wanted to be a mother. From age twelve, when I was babysitting the neighbors’ children for seventy-five cents an hour and spent the entire day locked out of the house while they ran wild inside it, motherhood was not for me. I was incapable of nurturing anyone younger than I was: I had a mental block—and a real antipathy—against making hats out of paper bags and other projects children supposedly liked to do. I had a recurring nightmare too: of a child who woke in the night wanting peanut butter, screaming for it when it wasn’t in the cupboards, at a time when the stores were closed, when it was impossible to procure; screaming until the only question was whether it would be me or the child who went out the window. Children were greedy by nature; they