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

would not ever, even when I was exhausted, consider my needs. And if this abstraction was based on nightmare and not experience, it felt quite real. As real as the fact that I was also greedy. I wanted my own time, my own money. My own life.
    In order to test the possibilities of my own motherhood, I dreamed my way through a novel. I challenged my characters: Were they human? Loveable? Was it possible for them to heal? Under the protection of historical fiction, I explored the bonds and the effects of abandonment—someone else’s choices, someone else’s pain—until I had written my way out of my nightmares of peanut butter and into the
still unconscious hope that love would not require me to be anything other than what I was.
    It was only days after I finished that manuscript that I became—accidentally—pregnant with my first child. Yet I still would not be aware of the link between them until it was pointed out to me by a stranger, several months after the novel was published. Even now, such a drastic, unconscious change makes me uneasy. If writing is truth-testing, a way for me to test the worst and see if I can bear it, then what am I testing now? I can feel myself moving again through my unconscious—it’s these odd dreams of my mother, for one; she is appearing quite often, even when I’m awake. If my first novel took me into motherhood, where will this one take me? My mother is part of the vehicle, but not the answer yet.

    “M any writers write to find out who they are, and what they think, and where they fit into the world. That’s what I am doing, but I am doing it by tracing the Japanese Americans. Because, even though I am one, I grew up having no idea about them—as a group, or even as members of my family.
    “I have grown up in peace and privilege, with no notion of war.
    “So, when you ask me what I am doing here in Hiroshima, I can say I am following the Japanese Americans. I am looking at history through their eyes. World War II, in particular, was very significant for Japanese Americans because they were caught in the middle, and distrusted by both countries. Being “outside” a country, though, also gave them a more objective look at the war. They didn’t have a government to spin out rhetoric and tell them what to think, to terrify them with visions of an enemy nation of fanatics and strange food. I am seeking the memories of a select few who were interned in the American camps and then repatriated to Japan to help me weave some very important missing experiences back into the fabric of our history—for Americans and for Japanese people:
    “Namely, what war looks like. What it smells like. What tiny bits of humanity are destroyed in each person, daily, in its great tide.”
    —author’s presentation at the YMCA, Hiroshima

FIRST TESTIMONY
    THERE IS SOMETHING MUFFLED in the Japan I’ve encountered so far. As the goal of my own apartment remains out of reach, I have moved out of my hotel and into the World Friendship Center, a halfway house for peace pilgrims looking for a quick dip into Japan and its bomb history, with western bathrooms and breakfast. The rooms are clean, and if the location is not the most convenient in the city—ensconced on a tiny street behind the love hotels that line the river—the biggest drawback is the five day limit for staying there, after which point, there is another five day option across the river. After that, I am out of luck. I can stay in a hotel for the duration or do what the other stray foreigners in Hiroshima do: leave.
    Do I want to give up, or am I just tired of not knowing, and of not being able to say?
    On this, my first morning at the World Friendship Center, I will hear a noise in the part of the building I was told was the kitchen and come downstairs to find a young woman. In this moment, my life will change. I will meet Ami, a girl who looks much younger than I am, though she will turn out to be almost thirty, a volunteer who turns only