When Amaterasu Takahashi opens the door of her Philadelphia home to a badly scarred man claiming to be her grandson, she doesn’t believe him. Her grandson and her daughter, Yuko, perished nearly forty years ago during the bombing of Nagasaki. But the man carries with him a collection of sealed private letters that open a Pandora’s Box of family secrets Ama had sworn to leave behind when she fled Japan. She is forced to confront her memories of the years before the war: of the daughter she tried too hard to protect and the love affair that would drive them apart, and even further back, to the long, sake-pouring nights at a hostess bar where Ama first learned that a soft heart was a dangerous thing. Will Ama allow herself to believe in a miracle?
Author Interview
What
sparked your interest in a story set in Nagasaki? Of the two cities
targeted by the atomic bombs, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, why did you
choose Nagasaki?
I’m
going to have to take you back to 1993. I was 21 years old. I’d
graduated from university with a degree in English and had no idea
about what I wanted to do in terms of a career. As I trawled job
advertisements at my parents’ home, a friend who was working at a
school in Japan wrote out of the blue: “Come here. You’d love it.
You can teach.”
In
that weird synchronicity of life, an advert appeared in a newspaper
looking for graduates to apply to GEOS, at that time one of the
world’s biggest English language schools. I got the job and was
allocated, at random, the city where I’d be teaching: Nagasaki.
Fate, I guess, or luck, led me there. I loved my own small piece of
Nagasaki: the curious ramshackle home I rented with the hole in the
floor in lieu of a flushing toilet, the tatami mats and paper sliding
doors in the bedroom, the tailless cats that loitered on my doorstep,
the lack of street names that left me lost on my first night, the
temples and shrines and foreigner cemeteries, the food, and the sheer
adventure of being dropped into a world so alien I had my own “alien
registration” card.
I
knew I wanted to set my first book in Nagasaki but I was wary about
tackling the atomic bomb. It was too big a topic, the devastation
real and not imagined, the aftermath still felt by generations of
families. However, every time I wrote about the city, the plot—or
rather the characters—took me back to the Second World War. And so
reluctantly, and cautiously, I began to feel my way towards a story
about an elderly woman called Amaterasu Takahashi who had lost her
daughter and grandson when Bockscar dropped Fat Man over Nagasaki—and
who had lived with that loss for forty years.
During
my two years living in Nagasaki, I attended the 50th
anniversary of the atomic bomb at Nagasaki Peace Park, alongside
30,000 more people who gathered together in the stifling heat to
remember the dead. I watched a small boy eat ice cream by a fountain
built to commemorate the fatally injured who had cried out for water.
I stored the memory of that boy away and later he turned into Hideo
Watanabe, the seven-year-old child seemingly killed on August 9,
1945.
Decades
pass in the book, and a man going by the same name arrives on the
doorstep of Amaterasu’s home in the US to declare he is the
grandson she thought dead. The adult Hideo has a type of retrograde
amnesia and I wanted his condition to reflect a certain historical
amnesia that we have in the West with regards to the atomic bombs.
Nagasaki was the second city hit. When we talk about nuclear war
Hiroshima is more often cited. That’s quite a thing, to have second
billing but to have shared the same horror.
Beyond
inspiring my first novel, Nagasaki has had a huge impact on my life.
It gave me my first job as a teacher, later my profession as a
journalist—and wonderful memories.
On
my first night in the city, a sushi restaurant owner, who also
happened to be a former boxer, declared: “For as long as you live
in Nagasaki I will protect you.” I feel the book is my way of
repaying my debt to all the kind people who looked after me when I
lived there. They protected me when I was young and a long way from
home.
Read the rest of the interview after the break.
Family
and relationships are central to this novel, especially the secrets
we keep and the question of how well we can ever know those closest
to us. Why did you choose to explore the history of Nagasaki’s
bombing through the lens of family?
The
statistics are hard to verify, people were on the move, the war was
chaotic, so we will never know how many people in total died in
Nagasaki because of the bomb, but one estimate is 75,000, with half
of that number killed on the day. How can one person, one reader, one
writer assimilate, comprehend and articulate that loss? The number is
too big. So step back, and take another step back and another until
you are left with just one family and one single perspective: Ama, a
survivor, a hibakusha.
I
wanted to imagine what happens when personal and public history
collide. Ama’s relationship with the bomb is more complicated than
just being a victim. She believes herself responsible for her
daughter and grandson’s deaths. She feels her actions, her flaws,
her determination to try to control the world around her—and those
she loves—is the reason they are killed. She drove them to Urakami,
the epicenter. When we meet Ama, in her early 80s, she is still
carrying this guilt. Why should she get to live when those closest to
her die? This is her torment.
I
wanted to explore what happens when our own “small” lives—the
secrets we keep, the harm we try not to do but do, the compromises we
cannot bear to make—are overshadowed by one bigger moment that
defines us for the rest of our lives. The bomb is the physical force
that destroys Ama’s family, but she is also an emotional force that
causes untold damage, she thinks. People feel sorry for her because
of the former and she hates herself for the latter.
Ama
lives with her failings every day until a man who claims to be her
grandson begins to suggest she can forgive herself, that regret and
guilt are not necessarily the end of her own story. That maybe she
can allow herself a happier ending.
How
did you research this novel? Were there any organizations or
resources in particular you accessed?
I
was lucky to meet people involved in peace organizations based in
Nagasaki, whose message was a simple one: “Never again.” I also
read a lot of memoirs from people living in the city when the bomb
dropped. Perhaps one of the best known is The
Bells of Nagasaki
by Takashi Nagai, a doctor who movingly recounts his experience as a
survivor. He also collated other memoirs, the most affecting being,
for me, the accounts from children.
Another
extraordinary resource was
Japan at War: An Oral History
by Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook. This is a stunning
compilation of recollections by ordinary Japanese. I used my own
knowledge of Nagasaki, my memories of living there twenty years ago:
the Dutch Slope, Glover Gardens, the bath houses, the diving platform
at Iojima, my own home, they are all places I visited and loved. I
also read other novels based in the city: Kazuo Ishiguro’s A
Pale View of the Hills
and Eric Faye’s Nagasaki
are wonderful. David Mitchell’s The
Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
is another book inspired by the city’s rich history.
I
did background reading on the medical effects of the bomb: the
different kinds of burns, the signs of radiation sickness, how the
doctors attempted to help so many wounded with limited resources. I
was specifically interested in how fetuses were affected. Many
miscarriages occurred in the aftermath of the bombing, and in babies
who were born live, there were reported cases of microcephaly, a
developmental brain disorder. I wanted to think about the damage done
not just on the day of August 9, but the legacy the bomb left in the
bones and blood and organs of the children. I was also influenced by
one Japanese doctor who I used to teach who was studying gigantism in
children. In the book, Jomei Sato is a doctor working at an orphanage
and we follow his research into the medical impact the radiation may
have had on some of the children he meets there.
A
DICTIONARY OF
MUTUAL
UNDERSTANDING is set both in more recent history in the United States
and, through flashbacks, Japan in the first half of the 20th
century. How did you decide to structure the novel this way?
Memory
isn’t linear so why does story-telling need to be? Our past,
present and future are all gloriously, irrevocably, and sometimes
terribly linked.
My
own family history probably also played a part in the structure of
the novel. My maternal granddad was killed in Normandy, France on
August 5, 1944 and my paternal grandfather fought against the
Japanese in Burma, but died before I was born. These men are
strangers and yet their legacy lives on through their offspring. My
mother will never stop mourning a father she never knew. Two slices
of history collide and run parallel: the living cohabit with the
dead. How are our lives shaped, or lessened, by such as loss and how
can we understand our selves fully if there are these missing chunks
in our past?
I
will confess I didn’t appreciate how tricky the split-time
narrative would be. I had endless notes to check that the births,
deaths, and marriages aligned. Chapters were shuffled back and
forward, others were erased, historical dates had to be slotted in
and then worried over. Despite the challenge of weaving the two
timeframes, I loved how it helped drive the plot forward, showing why
Ama’s present is a product of her past but also how she might carve
out a different future.
You
include Japanese words and their definitions at the start of each
chapter. Where are they from? Why did you decide to use them, and how
do they relate to the title of the book? What does the book’s title
mean to you?
When
I moved into my first flat in Nagasaki I found two books left behind
by the departing teacher I was replacing. The first one was called An
English Dictionary of Japanese Culture
by Bates Hoffer and Nobuyuki Honna (1986). Each definition appears in
Japanese with an English translation and is sometimes accompanied by
fairly crude but delightful drawings. I picked definitions from the
book to form most of the chapter headings. For example the book
begins with a definition of yasegaman
(endurance). It means the combination of yaseru
(to become skinny) and gaman-suru
(to endure), or to endure until one becomes emaciated. The language
seemed exhilarating different, so vivid and visual.
But
beyond the delight of the language itself, I wanted the chapter
headings to provide a layer of understanding about some of the
cultural mores the characters might be influenced by. I aimed to give
readers who were not Japanese a shortcut into that world, a code of
sorts since many of the tensions experienced by the characters might
be internal ones not expressed verbally. For example, take another
definition, sasshi.
This can be translated as “understanding” or “conjecture” and
refers to the idea that direct self-expression is frowned upon,
people are expected to guess what others intend to say. By including
sasshi,
I hoped readers would understand that what is being said might not be
what is being felt. The silences may be where the story lies.
The
second book is called Nagasaki
Peace Trail,
compiled by the organization, Mutual Understanding for Peace Nagasaki
(MUP). The guidebook provides a history of the city, a walking trail
of landmarks affected by August 9, 1945 and a glossary of terms
related to the atomic bomb. Seeing the translations of those terrible
words—charred bodies, men literally like rags, ruined city—moved
me deeply, not just the words themselves, but also the image of a
group of people sitting down and wondering: how do we educate people
who are not Japanese about the bomb from a Japanese point of view?
I
think that drive for communication, the need to find common ground,
to reach some “mutual understanding” despite differences in
language, culture and geography, is a glorious ambition.
I
did toy with book titles that were a lot shorter. It is a mouthful!
That’s part of the point. Communication isn’t easy, neither is
appreciating another point of view so different from our own,
especially if that point of view comes from a person once labeled an
“enemy.”
When
we meet Ama she has been living in America for years but her English
is still poor. This suits her. She doesn’t want to communicate with
neighbors; she wants to be cut off by her lack of vocabulary and
grammar. If she can’t speak English, she can’t tell her story.
Her journey is about learning to converse with the past rather than
rejecting it. Can she reach a mutual understanding with people who
are no longer alive?
Japanese
people might look at the novel and think: “Hmm, so you’ve decided
to write a book set during one of the most painful periods of our
history from the point of view of a Japanese woman when you don’t
speak the language, have not been brought up in the culture and were
not alive at the time? Really?” The title is also meant to
acknowledge that I am attempting to cross cultures to reach common
ground.
Clearly
I am not a man. I am not Asian. I’m not a soldier. But when I read
accounts from Japanese soldiers of those final days of war as they
marched, diseased and starving, through stinking jungles and rotting
coastlines, I can imagine the suffering. I recall stories of men
clinging together in one final embrace as they detonated a hand
grenade between them, or soldiers collecting the fingers of fallen
comrades so that some part of the dead could be cremated and returned
to their families. These men fought against my paternal granddad in
Burma, but in those moments of death, I don’t see sides taken, I
just see young men dying. I guess that is my attempt at mutual
understanding.
What
do you want people to take away from reading your book?
I
hope you’ll be moved and uplifted by Ama’s story but I’m not
sure she’d want you to feel sorry for her. I’d hope people might
better appreciate the cost of war from all sides of a conflict. I’d
hope people would think about the simple questions that tend to get
lost among the big political arguments about nuclear arms. Why do we
still have these weapons? Can we not imagine a world free of them?
Away
from war, I guess the book is also about how we love people. Can we
love too much, and can that be as damaging as loving too little? Do
our regrets grow or diminish as we age? Can we forgive others for
their trespasses upon us? More importantly, can we forgive ourselves?
Is that not what we all want in the final moments of life? Peace.
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