Free Hiroshima in the Morning by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto Page A

in its first ten years, that there were no such effects, well, they are not the ABCC. Let us talk instead about Electron Spin Resonancing, and how RERF scientists are using it to measure doses of radiation and correlate chromosome aberration frequency in lymphocytes. The RERF contradicts the ABCC wholesale, without ever admitting that it is a contradiction. The mistakes, the manipulation, the evil if there was an evil, are simply gone.
     
    MY MOTHER DOES NOT COME to me until I leave the compound and walk to where I’m standing now, on the edge of the road, looking out at the terraced military cemetery of war dead. I feel her, and wait, taking in the jumble of stone beneath me, wondering whether no one is visiting because it’s too hot—which is the most often uttered comment I’ve heard so far in Japan—or because the families who would care for these graves perished in the bomb. I’m getting used to my mother’s presence and fully expect that she’s here to give me another puzzle. The last time she visited me, I was standing in front of the A-bomb Dome. There, she ‘showed’ me a white crane disappearing into the rubble. The bird took me back to my wedding, for which my mother’s entire family folded one thousand white origami cranes for good luck. My grandmother had not been happy with the color—white for death, white for modern young people
in Hawaii—and I was still working out what my mother meant for the crane to tell me, other than that I should call home. I’d called—mother’s orders after all—and it was a nice conversation. Brian was sleepy, he’d been out late to a concert the night before; he and the boys were going to a baseball game together later. These adventures had defused some of the testiness that had recently been creeping into our conversations. For the moment, all was calm.
    I am also happier. I am settled in my apartment; I have a few friends, including Kimiko’s small group of peace activists who invited me to a party on the riverbank on August 6, the anniversary of the bombing. The activists are a diverse group, some very political, others very religious; some hibakusha themselves and others just folks with time on their hands. Ami will join us. I don’t know yet which category she fits into: she’s a single woman, an only child living with her parents, so she has plenty of time to organize interviews for me, to translate them, to show me a bit of Japan. My freedom, not only my lack of daily duties but also the odd conclusions I often draw from the left field of being American, intrigue her, and she’s begun taking me to see some of the traditional arts that are still practiced here, like Noh. She is watching for something in my reactions, an urgency, maybe, a sign that it matters; I can sense it but am trying not to shape my response accordingly. And if Brian is still not terribly interested in my activities, I choose not to dwell on that. At least he has pictures of my new apartment now to place me. Sometimes, I try to tell him about my interviews: the hibakusha ’s insistence that they hold no grudge against
America for dropping the bomb and killing their families; their emphasis on their sacrifice and their duty, which is nothing less than to save the world. They have a strange idea of peace—they believe it exists now , that all we have to do is get rid of those nuclear weapons and there will never again be a war. It seems naïve—not because I’m against disarmament, but how do they disregard all the wars around the globe since the 1940s? I don’t dwell on this with Brian, though; he switches off so easily.
    Today, overlooking the cemetery, my mother is quiet. I know that, if I turn to see her, she’ll disappear. It makes sense that I have no image to accompany my mother’s presence. I imagine her as a soul curling up in the softness of her body, inhabiting less and less of the outer layers. It’s a slow process: first the skin is not her own, then the fat. We