Free Dreams of Speaking by Gail Jones Page B

By 1934, his premises produced both the tiny cogs of watches and the girders for a bridge, and metal items of assorted shapes and sizes in between, some for the Mitsubishi dockyards, some for the munitions factories.
    Hiroshi had two older sisters, Sachiko and Mihoko, who doted on their younger brother and were clever and witty. They attended an exclusive girls’ school in the centre of the city, at which they were taught English and French, as well as traditional academic studies and female accomplishments. Hiroshi remembers his sisters chattering trilingually, making jokes and exchanging confidences in a plait of languages. Sometimes, in the space of one or two sentences, Sachiko and Mihoko shifted linguistic registers, so that no one knew exactly what they were talking about, and Hiroshi was often frustrated to the point of tears when he could not follow their secretive, erratic conversations.
    When he was six his father employed two private tutors – a Japanese scholar, Masa Tanaka, almost eighty, who was a famous practitioner of the art of haiku , and a young man from Manchester, England, who was not particularly scholarly, but adored his own language with singular devotion. Harold O’Toole was twenty-six years old, had startling blond hair, and fell almost at once in love with Sachiko,who had turned seventeen the week he arrived. Hiroshi detected his foreign tutor’s divided attentions and strove to excel, anxious to impress the young man with his English language fluency and his penchant for difficult vocabulary. By the time he was eleven, in 1945, Hiroshi was reading classic English novels and adopting regional accents as a form of play – although still not quite commanding the pronunciation of ‘l’. Harold O’Toole – who had been protected from internment during the war by the wealth of the Sakamotos – was still love-struck by Sachiko, but by then she was interested in a young biology teacher, a Christian, who worked at the Chinzei middle school. Only when Hiroshi was an adult did he learn from his mother that Mihoko had been in love with Harold O’Toole, and that this mismatch of feeling, this mis-crossing of desires, had caused the family much worry and distress.
    Of the day in August 1945, when the world changed, changed utterly, Mr Sakamoto disclosed very little. Alice must not be offended, he said; he had never told his wife or two adult daughters the details of his experience. The outline was simply that he and his mother had been saved, but that the rest of the family had perished. Almost everyone he knew had perished. Sachiko and Mihoko had perished. His father. Mr O’Toole. The biology teacher in Chinzei middle school. Almost 74,000 people in the explosion alone. His Japanese tutor, who at the time of the explosion had been in the mountains meditating by a stream, survived, but wished he hadn’t and committed suicide two weeks after the blast. Poetry, said Mr Sakamoto, was no longer possible.
    The child Hiroshi and his mother moved to Tokyo, where she had relatives. When Tadeo, his mother’s brother, returned from the war, they all lived together in a small apartment near a bombed-out suburb. At length Uncle Tadeo discoveredOsamu’s overseas bank accounts, and the existence of two remaining factories in Honshu, and the makeshift family, bleak with grief, moved to a larger dwelling in a better area.
    Hiroshi was a restless young man who could settle to nothing and was afraid of attachment. He entered an intellectual world of remote theorems and calculations, and at one time entertained the idea – somewhat vengefully – of becoming a theoretical physicist. But some ‘perversity’, he said, intuitively prevailed, so that in post-war Japan, when others turned to pragmatism and the business of reconstruction, he found himself reading haiku , and English novels and European poetry in translation. He felt like a being from another