The Grave on the Wall by Brandon Shimoda

Author:Brandon Shimoda
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: City Lights Publishers

Their voices were plangent, definitive. They sounded like they were delivering soliloquies at the edge of a cliff. I thought of the young boy standing up to the spirits of the peach orchard in Kurosawa’s dream (I can buy peaches at the store! But where can you buy a whole orchard in bloom?) Masahiro and Nanoka’s message was of sorrow and hope, but they were speaking to the ruins. Adults, what can adults provide? What can adults instill in the faithful and faithless alike that the thousands of disappeared and disappearing witnesses cannot? The morning was a ritual, but Masahiro and Nanoka, their voices pitched into the sky beyond the museum, reinforced the fact, by way of the sun and heat—eyes closed, sweating, clenching their fists—that we were gathered in a burial ground. It was as if they were saying: if we understand, if we are courageous enough to raise our voices above the bodies of the dead . . .

The basement auditorium of the Memorial Museum was full, but during the intermission between Japanese and English, it emptied, and only a small number of people remained. Ten westerners, Americans mostly, moved to the front to listen to five hibakusha—two women, three men—share their stories. I opened my notebook and wrote down as much as I could, because I knew I wanted—that I would continue to want—to return, every year, to their stories, to what they had come such an extraordinary distance to share.

Keiko was eight at the time of the bomb. She spoke the longest. Her story began with a refusal. People were dying all around her—burning, thirsty, in need of water. She gave them water from the family well. They drank the water, vomited, died. She knew she did not kill them but felt, it was me! It was easier for Keiko to take responsibility for their deaths than to try to explain what she could not. Her story began when she decided she was never going to tell anyone. She called it her invisible scar.

Isao was thirteen at the time of the bomb. Shoso and Keijiro were sixteen. Sumiko was seventeen. Shoso said he hated America. He took our hands in his and thanked us for being there. I felt in his hands the burden of his hatred yet saw on his face the complexity of his hatred being unresolved, solicitous, open.

Shoso Hirai (16)

My father and younger brother were killed instantly . . . My older brothers were in China as soldiers . . . But the air raid alarm was soon cancelled . . . As soon as I touched the door, I was hit by a strong blast . . . It became dark all around me . . . Every path that led to my house was engulfed in flames . . . I thought, There must have been a big disaster in Hiroshima . . . We spent the night at the farmer’s house . . . It seemed as if we had just walked through the Gate of Hell .

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