Read Hiroshima in the Morning for Free Online

did not spend together in New York? Though I know I’m not being lazy, that I am trying everything I can to get started, what Brian has refrained from saying is also true: I didn’t plan well. There was a time when I thought six months was too long, that I could wrap up my research in three weeks, a month tops. What happened to that efficient person? It’s a question neither one of us is ready to ask.
    The light, when I reach the west building, is dimmer. This exhibit starts with a flickering tableau framed in scorched, red brick arches. Several wax figures—a man, woman, and child, or is it two children? Surely it’s a woman because she hasn’t quite lost all her hair—drip red skin off their hands, pick their way through crumbling walls, against a backdrop of fire, arms extended like sleepwalkers. Here are the pored-over, larger-than-life-sized photos of the survivors resting on Miyuki Bridge, more than a mile and three hours from the explosion. Out of focus, or is it just that their hair has been tufted by the blast, turned into soft black cotton or stolen completely along with pieces of clothing, along with skin and other soft body parts that melted in the heat? There is horror here, finally, but it’s a thin scream only. A section of wall with shards of glass embedded in it, warped iron shutters from the clothing depot that stood
more than 2,600 meters away. There are tattered uniforms of schoolchildren, each arrayed on its own palate. Twisted eyeglasses. A belt, a bag, a lunch box filled with carbon.
    Bits of nail. Bits of skin.
     
    WHAT IS IT I WANT to feel? There’s a connection I am missing: a howl. There are people around me now, crying; they’re turning away from the unbearable, and all I feel is anger. I know what they do not: Hiroshima has been erased. Whatever the museum shows or cannot show, I myself erased it. I refused the bomb; I would not acknowledge it even when someone tried to tell me. I can’t expunge the vision of myself, nodding away Aunt Molly’s tears, smoothing the family history so it could be put away. This is my shame now: I was impatient for the tidbits of internment and impervious to the discussion of wholescale slaughter. At that point in my research, I was merely following a map I knew, savoring the confirmation of right turns, of alleys and the angle of light in the corners where certainty bloomed.
    Now I don’t want to forget. Without memory, what is left? Only the present, which, as I’ve come to realize, may be less “real” than the past. If my mother is no longer who she once was, then when was she? When was the last time she was herself, at her best? And if I can’t say, exactly, if I can’t locate a specific person in the timeline and say “this is it; this is her essence,” then how do I comprehend my mother now? How do I comprehend Hiroshima?
    The world is forgetting what happened here. The museum, for all its remembrances, is forgetting what happened.
Is this what peace is, this forgetting? I cannot accept this. Over and over, I have proven myself to be part of an amnesiac society—in my excuses, my inability to feel, my plain old refusal to acknowledge the existence of something that was right in front of me, I erased the hibakusha just as surely as the bomb did, and I cannot accept that this is what peace is supposed to be. I erased the girl without a face, and now I need to know: Who was she? What did she look like? I came to the Peace Museum to be confronted by this girl and hundreds of thousands like her, to be their witness, at last to see:
    The pattern of a crane, burnt into skin.
    The shadow of a woman, etched into stone.
    A hand without fingers. A mouth without lips.
    The space where there was once a nose.
    I came for resurrection. But all I found is the space inside me, and around me, opening, in the absence of certainty.

    “T here will always be people who seek you out. They like to talk to foreigners, practice their English. They will help you,