Free Nagasaki by Emily Boyce Éric Faye

was returning to one of my oldest habitats. Site of my eight-year-long ‘age of discovery’. An
age of wonder and untold promise. I dare say in recent times you rarely stopped to appreciate the view from the window of what had been my bedroom – and became yours, many years later. You had perhaps become blasé about it. But imagine what it meant for a little girl like me to take in the sight of Mount Inasa and the bay, the dockyards and all the boats, all at once. Leaning a little to the left, I could see Oura church where I had been baptised, or all the way over to the right, the distant northern neighbourhoods; strange, these Catholic areas razed to the ground by a Christian country’s bomb … There are so few Christians in Japan, it’s as if the raging atoms dumped by America had meant to play a tasteless trick on them.
    I loved my bedroom, my balcony on the world, a world reborn after the deaths of many of my ancestors, one 9 August long ago. Eight of my years went by there. How I loved those rooms, those walls … It seems to me it should be written into the constitution of every country that every person should have the inalienable right to return to the significant places of their
past, at a time of their choosing. They should be handed a bunch of keys giving them access to all the flats, houses and gardens in which their childhood was played out, and allowed to spend whole hours in these winter palaces of the memory. Never must the new owners be allowed to stand in the way of these pilgrims of time. I believe this strongly, and should I become politically engaged again, I think it would be the sole focus of my manifesto, my one and only campaign pledge.
    One Sunday in autumn, the year I turned sixteen, my parents drove to near Shimabara to visit some cousins. They never came back. A landslide caused by the storm we were having swept the road away beneath them, somewhere up in the mountains. And that was that. I was an orphan. My remaining family members took me in. I went to live with an uncle and aunt. I remember the day I moved out. I never dreamed I would one day come crawling back like a petty thief to hole up in the room my parents had once slept in.
    Later, I managed to get into university, in Fukuoka. My studies did not go well. I
couldn’t stick at anything. Little by little, I came to see that the landslide was still going on inside me. It had taken its first prey one day in the typhoon; now it was my turn. The ground continued to crumble, only more slowly and insidiously this time. Piece by piece, it took apart the life I would have liked to lead. Whatever I did, everything fell from my grasp. Some part of the mechanism must have broken. I began to hate the way the world was going and got in with a certain crowd. In 1970, at the age of twenty, I joined the highly subversive United Red Army. The renewal of the security treaty between our country and the United States continued to ally us with the people who had dropped an atomic bomb on my family. The hatred I felt! I spent years hating. Everything else was beside the point. I devoted myself to my red dreams the way others devote themselves to oil painting. But I couldn’t even take my taste for the extreme seriously. We had a passion for failure while hurling victory slogans. One day, some of the group were arrested. I had to lie low. I ended up getting into drugs and my former self dissolved,
the self I had been trying to escape by becoming part of a collective movement. I was given a new identity, brand-new papers. I had a succession of salaried jobs and was never able to seize the second chance that my new name offered me. That’s all there is.
    February 2009–April 2010

About the Author
    Éric Faye
    Born in Limoges, Éric Faye is a journalist and the prize-winning author of more than twenty books.
     
    Emily Boyce
    Emily Boyce is in-house translator at Gallic Books. She lives in London.

Copyright
    First published in France as
Nagasaki
by