jyu (10)

The color of the light was yellow. No, I am sure of it. I do not care what others say. Can a single flash so stupendous be misinterpreted as to its color? It was everywhere. Did you ask Mrs. Nakano? She died right beside me.

It was so bright, that I left a shadow on the steps of the bank, next to that of Mrs. Nakano’s. The two shadows met as if kissing. I saw it, ever so briefly before I found myself here.

What? It is only my death that interests you? The exact moment, nothing before, nothing after. Have you learned nothing about the dangers of simplification?

ku (9)

No, I am not done. (cough)

Mrs. Nakano and I were talking when the sky flashed. We had collided as she rushed up the stone steps, having just dropped off her nephew at the demolition work site at Koami-cho. Her purse flew in my face, knocking my glasses off, and she laughed, embarrassed.

Mr. Higuchi, she said. I’m so sorry. These days it seems safest to get to where one is going as quickly as possible.

She picked up my glasses and handed them to me. And I reached down for the small box she had dropped. She took it from me in both hands, like she was cupping a bowl of rice.

She was a strange woman. An old childhood schoolmate of my wife’s. I admit that I did not like her much. And I would have much preferred to wait there on the steps by myself.

But then she told me a story. Her daughter had hit a homerun a year ago. In a pristine ballpark across the sea in a city the Americans called Modesto. Ten years old, a lucky girl, dark brown hair, Hakujin father. How he must have plotted and planned to keep her secret. Half Spanish, perhaps he said, or Black Irish. Just that morning, Mrs. Nakano had found a baseball on her doorstep, wrapped in hemp cloth, held tight with twine. Her daughter had signed her name on the baseball, along with the date and the English words “homerun–right field bleachers.” There were other names on the ball. Arnold Pittswheeler, Bakersfield, CA. A woman named Betty Crummer, Los Angeles. Sergeant Dick Mum, Pt. Mugu. Nils Wechsler, Pearl City, Hawaii. Tom Liu, Wahiwa, Hawaii. Aleksandr Vlachko, Kuril Islands. Akira Suzuki, Sapporo. What incomplete story did these people tell while holding this ball, stroking its seams, finding a pen and adding their moniker upon it before passing it on. Maybe it was the exact true story, carefully memorized word for word, “Katie Wiley has a Japanese mother who lives in Hiroshima...”

I’m going to store this at the bank, Mrs. Nakano said, waving the box in my face. I’m going to keep it safe.

She asked me if I wanted to hold the baseball. I remember why I didn’t like her, that damn insouciant attitude, like every oyster would yield, like she could find pearls in this war that nobody else could. I politely said no.

hachi (8)

I saw Shinichi Ishimaru pitch his last game before the war claimed him. He had an interesting way of cupping the ball, not in the natural cradle, but tensely at the edge of the palm, with the wrist bent and fingers spidering over it. I wonder if he swore at his hands’ betrayal as they fumbled at the controls of his crashing bomber.

Am I frowning? Do I even remember how the necessary muscles pull together to make a frown. I am thinking about my hands. Look at them. They do not look like my hands. The knuckles, they pucker differently, the flex of the fingers are too smooth. And there are, after all, five fingers on each hand. These are the hands I had before the war. Before I lost the thumb and index during training exercises. These are my actor’s hands.

Watch.

That was the salute I did in “Traveling Hero.” It was to be a salute with no honor.

Watch again.

In the context of the entire film, you would have seen it as a poignant moment. The hero falls, disgraced, but at the last moment gives his life for his commanding officer and remains the hero. Not a film for the war effort. Too interpretive. Was he really a hero or just doing his duty? Or in doing his duty was he then the only kind of hero?

So, a position in the Imperial Japanese Army was deemed a better use of my time, until the loss of those crucial fingers made me a civilian again. I had doubts that I would be able to act again after the war, as an actor’s hands are second only to the expression in his eyes.

That morning on the way to the bank, I replayed the film in my mind, just to distract me from other matters. I sat in the back of the streetcar, whispering the lines of all the characters. Less than twenty-five minutes of dialogue. I did not realize how many drawn-out battle scenes there were where I simply wielded a sword and bared my teeth. I can sing you the theme of the music that played underneath those scenes. Rousing. Incendiary. Ta dum, ta da, ta da, ta dum. Twill twill twill.

I had a career that might have surpassed even that of Sessue Hayakawa, had I fled to Europe as did he. I was offered a part in a film of his, but when the war started, he abandoned the project. I only assume he did so because my letter, my acceptance of the part, was never acknowledged. But the film could have come out later, with a promising new co-star, a premiere in Paris with flutes of champagne and no darkness under the guests’ eyes. How would I know if this happened or not? I am dead.

But the rumor was that Sessue Hayakawa had given up acting and was painting in the south of France, perhaps with the same transcendence he dutifully demonstrated in every part he ever played. I imagine him in a high, domed room with tall windows that let in the frayed light of the morning. Besmocked, barefoot on stained tarp. Brush poised. A frown of artistic discernment hiding his deeply creviced soul, a look I know would have been practiced to perfection.

In 1940, I could have gone to France, but I met my wife, Mary Yukio.

shichi (7)

The mission was on the way to the streetcar station. I stopped by to tell Father Schubert that Mary Yukio was ill and would not be coming in, and to pick up my daily egg.

It was minutes after the all-clear siren had sounded. Before I could even knock, Father Schubert came up behind me and put a heavy hand on my shoulder.

“Who are you?” he said. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m Mary Yukio’s husband.” I said it in German.

He looked at me closer. “There will not be any more eggs.” And he pushed by me and went into the mission.

Father Schubert was a dour man even for a German priest. And he became even more unpleasant when Germany fell. Even so, Mary Yukio was lucky to work at the mission compound. Because she had spent most of her teenage years in Honolulu, she wasn’t quite trusted to work in any of the war effort jobs. Her knowledge of English (surpassing even mine) and German worked in her favor with Father Schubert, as he often needed documents translated and he had begun to depend on her. Of course, her formal job was the cleaning of the toilettes, the cooking of their midday meal, polishing the remaining silver and brass in the chapel. But a certain benefit of the job was that Father Schubert often gave her eggs— a luxury— precious, precious eggs from the country. These eggs were transported from some unknown location and left on their doorstep every other day. Some rich man’s penitence, I am sure.

Father Schubert became ill that first day of the egg deliveries, he thought maybe from the poached egg he had so greedily consumed that morning. So he offered Mary Yukio an egg to take home from every delivery. To test out. It was insulting. But she would take those eggs, because she knew I loved them. I had learned to eat them for breakfast while I was in London in ’32 working on a film. She knew I was tired of the porridge we tried to dress up with a bit of dried plum or a sprinkle of bonito shavings. Mary Yukio looked out for me. And I took it for granted that she would always give more than I demanded.

I never got sick from the eggs and thus, both Father Schubert and myself had them fried, poached, or scrambled whenever we wanted.

A half a dozen priests filed by me, coming from around the corner, from the cool dark burrow that was their bomb shelter. They squinted at me. I grinned at them, I knew they would not last much longer in this country.

roku (6)

There is a boarded up auditorium in a little park on the way to the mission. That morning, I pulled off the wooden slats nailed across the entrance and went inside. It was not musty like I thought it would be. The windows were clean, and light illuminated the wooden stage, making it gleam.

It was here on this stage, five years ago, that I met Mary Yukio. She played the monkey spirit in a children’s play I was adapting from the well-known story of the monk, Hsuan Tsang, and his journey to India to find Buddha’s truth. Kishiro Yamamoto’s film on the same subject had just been released to almost no notice, but I went to see it anyway, because I was a fan. I had never forgotten that old fable that my old obaasan would tell to me as she cooked manju, while plying me with spoonfuls of azuki or sweetened chestnuts. So it was the children’s version that I remembered, with an embarrassing warm pleasure. As I watched the very fierce drama of Yamamoto’s vision, I could only think of Obaasan’s version, the funny monkey face of Sun Wukung who protects the boy monk from demons and monsters, and I was shamefully inspired to produce that memory out of pure indulgence.

It could only be financed if I made it for children.

It might have been described as indolent, my attitude towards my career. I admit, I complained and fussed over parts offered. But I was seldom excited by our staid and regulated film industry. It was the American Western that I so admired and American actors like William Boyd and John Wayne. But westerns were falling out of favor. In those films, duty to country seemed more secondary. It’s not as if I was not patriotic, but somehow selfishness grounded me like duty could not and I wanted to produce something ordinary, something that had been done countless times. I did not even want a fresh slant. I wanted Sun Wukung to decapitate a monster.

I cast Mary Yukio as Sun Wukung because she was small and wiry with a round full face and large double-lidded eyes. Something of the monkey in my Mary Yukio already with her quick aggressive movements and frank unblinking stare. She had no experience acting, but I needed an adult in the part as it required an amount of memorization that the 11-year-olds that auditioned did not seem to grasp.

Mary Yukio was a friend’s sister. She’d been back in Hiroshima for a year and had no friends, no job. My friend was despairing of her, watching her grow more surly and alone each day and he suggested her for the part. I worked her hard and we bickered constantly.

Backstage, the night of the opening, with her monkey costume halfway pulled up, her breasts strapped flat to her chest with soft white gauze, she looked at me as if seeing all the selfish fates in my eyes and she pulled me to her and kissed me.

She went on stage to the cheers of the children and mothers and swung her tail with verve and deference at the same time, and when she lopped off the head of a plaster demon, I decided that I was in love.

We were closed down after the Indian Ocean disputes in November as the local authorities did not care for the play’s non-traditional slant and its sympathies toward China and India.

go (5)

When I was six, I got lost in the Honnoji Cemetary in Kyoto. It began to rain and I took shelter in an old gardening shed. On a low table were baskets filled with toys and canned fruits, dried flowers still slightly sweet-smelling, and odd items I did not recognize. Gifts to the deceased collected off the graves. Toys and foods I’d never seen in our own cupboard at home. But what interested me were these long shiny strips laying off to the side, that, when I held them up to the faint light, I saw pictures lined one on top of the other. Scenes of two men with fists the size of melons locked in some sort of combat, a pale crowd of faces behind them watching. And although it at first appeared that each scene was the same, when I examined them closer, I saw the slight change of positions, the infinitesimal movements towards the end frame: one man lying prone at the other man’s feet.

I took them home and hung them outside, like wind chimes. I would watch the sun play through the twisting celluloid, the casting shadows whipping across my body, flashing gold in my eyes. I eventually forgot about them and it wasn’t until I was thirteen that I took them down and saw that the pictures were now indistinguishable, faded to a translucent orange. And when I was twenty-two, I became an actor and did my first film, and I realized that the strips were rare 70 millimeter footage. I could tell from the sprocket holes. When I was thirty-two, I played an Indonesian boxer in a British film and in my research of the part, I realized the strips had been of the Corbett-Fitzsimmons boxing match held in 1897 in Carson City, Nevada, where Corbett went down in the 14th round. I knew because I remembered that fifth to last frame, that of the punch, famously to his solar plexus.

And I could finally wonder at the eccentricity of such a gift to the dead.

shi (4)

I sat eight feet under the earth, in our bomb shelter. Wooden braces barely supported the crumbling walls. A messy incomplete job. But where was I to get concrete? I knew people stole bricks from the demolition sites at night, and, in other cities, I heard that people ran towards buildings that were being bombed, just to cannibalize the remains to add to their own shelters.

I had brought into my shelter, the Cine Sakura camera that Mary Yukio found for me in a shop in Yamaguchi. She visited Yamaguchi, to see Old Auntie, a dozen times a year, war or no war.

The night before, Mary Yukio had presented me with the camera.

I thought you could show your film strips, she said. She sneezed twice. She had been feeling poorly.

It was not a projector as she thought, but I didn’t bother to correct her. I don’t believe I even looked up at Mary Yukio. I didn’t thank her. Perhaps I nodded, I do not remember. I went back to reading and a few moments later she left my side. Such is the routine of marriage in the confines of curfews and war.

Our bomb shelter had a single table in the middle. I set down the camera and examined it. The black exterior was cracked. The lens and crank long since gone. I opened it up. The inside was gutted. The gears and heart removed. When I leaned in close, I smelled sour metal. I ran my middle finger along the edges, feeling the coarseness of the rust. Resting towards the front was a folded piece of paper.

It was a note to me from Old Auntie. She had written about an old beau of Mary Yukio’s, a rich banker, who comes for tea every time she visits. All is perfectly proper, do not worry Great Nephew, but I respectfully tell you that this man is now working at the big bank, in Hiroshima where you live.

I immediately imagined Mary Yukio with this banker at the junk store in Yamaguchi.

– Oh, my husband would like this.

– What is it?

– He has these film strips.

– It looks broken.

– No, he’ll like this.

– And what do you like, Mary Yukio?

Did she then look up at him in surprise? Or did they exchange familiar looks? Did he dare to touch her hand?

Mary Yukio had wanted us to make the bomb shelter comfortable. She had laid out a tatami on the floor, folded our second-best futon in the corner, lined up whatever canned foods we had, along the wall. To my right, hung my old film strips, on fishing line, making scratching noises every time I stood up in the small space. To my left, hung her favorite hiroshige. The one of the temple in Yamaguchi. She had told me that Old Auntie had given it to her. Such a suspiciously expensive present from such a poor poor woman.

I pushed the camera onto the floor. It thudded on the hard earth and dust rose. I stood up, ready to pull the hiroshige from the wall. The film strips crackled with my sudden energy.

Then it was 7:00 am. The sirens blared. The sound stilled me and I looked up at that rectangle of blue, the open door of the bomb shelter angled up towards the sky. American weather planes cruised overhead every morning at this time. But today I did not have the time to watch for them.

I would go to the bank. I would wait for him. And when I saw him, coming up the steps, important in his suit, unaware of my regard, what would be his countenance? Contentment, a sterling conscience and a shining work ethic? And when we were finally face to face, his expression slowly collecting, in his eyes would I even recognize that which I lacked?

I climbed out of our bomb shelter while everyone else in the city was dutifully climbing into their own.

san (3)

You think that I selfishly keep you here to shed my memories, like peels of skin, sloughed off with a simple shrug. You, with your immortal clipboard.

Of course it is like that. Of course, a corporeal form will reform with all its aches and desires and condemnations.

In reality, in reality, the moment of my death was brief. Is the duration of a moment enough time for a human being to transform in some way? In this case, it was the disintegration of a human body, 45 years of accumulation— scarring, creasing, the toughening of soles and palms— gone in a moment.

But in truth, in truth, it was not brief at all. It was an event. My death was heavy with the orchestration of clever clever minds—the canon behind the bomb. The pageantry of the light—I remember standing against it— purely cerebral, soul-less if you please, the last synapses snapping. I resisted the insignificance with the weight of my life.

I see the look on your face. Hiroshima was different somehow and you cannot tell me.

ni (2)

This sequence plays over and over in my head.

I see the bomb bay doors opening and thousands of insects are released. Some are not winged and they plunge down, but others have brittle little wings and they are pulled away on drafts of wind, wings jerking, trying to glide. It brings me horror, this dream.

Why must I dream this?

You have no answer for me. Wait, where are you going?

I don’t want to be alone.

ichi (1)

I woke up before Mary Yukio, I think for the first time ever. Her face was scrunched, puffy from illness. I kissed her on the nose, on her cheek which was wet, and wondered what had made her cry in her dreams. I thought that there would be time to ask her later, when our drudgery of a day was over, during that space of time when we sit at the table, where we eat yet another boiled potato and talk.

I am not sure what woke me. The general alarm had not sounded yet. The neighborhood was quiet. I decided I could be useful and continue stocking our bomb shelter. I got out of bed and walked into the kitchen. The table was beautifully set for two. And I realized that before she goes to sleep every night, Mary Yukio must lay out the table for us. A handful of kiku floating in her favorite raku bowl. Blue-lacquered chopsticks resting on porcelain holders in the shape of dolphins. She must eat breakfast alone across from an empty setting, waiting for me.

Normally, when I wake up, Mary Yukio has already left and my precious German egg lays cold in its pan on the stove and the table is clear with only yesterday’s newspaper, picked up the night before, folded and placed in the center. And I sit and read, sipping my tea, until the alarm sounds and I wonder if it is worth the fifteen steps to our shelter.

I stood over my setting on the table, undecided. Then I went back to the bedroom, back to bed. I curled myself around Mary Yukio so her head was under my chin and I could see the strong fine knobs of her spine that disappeared into the collar of her yukata and I thought that I would lie there for just a moment before the day began.