Mari L'Esperance

When Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s defeat over national radio, his divinity was broken, fell away and settled in fine gold dust at his feet. His people understood the gravity of the occasion—a god does not speak over the airwaves with a human voice, ordinary and flecked with static. A god does not speak in the common voice of the earthbound, thick with shame. At the station, my mother, a schoolgirl, looked on as men in uniform lurched from the platform into the path of incoming trains, their slack bodies landing on the tracks without sound.

I don’t recall when I first understood why you stiffen at the roar of low flying jets— Did you tell me, Mother, or did I just know? When you refused to show me the caves like eyes in the hills behind Bah-chan’s house— Did I only dream it, how when the sirens began the trains stopped dead in their tracks, unleashing a stream of thousands to rush blind and headlong toward those sheltering hills— The damp press of strange bodies in darkness rank with the stench of war’s leavings, only imagine a young girl’s cries drowned in the tumult, urgent groping of unseen hands— the bombs raining d0wn on Yokohama Harbor all through the night, hothouse blooms crackling in a seething sky, then hissing into a boiling sea— Was it a millennium that passed before the sirens ceased their wailing, only to be taken up again by the dogs and the dying? But you talk of none of this today. We walk slowly, saying little, as if less said will keep the heat at bay. The air is wet, heavy with summer smells carried aloft on the hypnotic drone of cicadas. You show me where as a girl you played in other summers, catching kabuto beetles and dragonflies in bamboo cages. What must go through you when we pass them at a distance, those black maws yawning out of the hillside, exhaling the unspeakable?

Near dusk I find her in a newly mown field, lying still and face down in the coarse stubble. Her arms are splayed out on either side of her body, palms open and turned upward like two lilies, the slender fingers gently curling, as if holding onto something. Her legs are drawn up underneath her, as if she fell asleep there on her knees, perhaps while praying, perhaps intoxicated by the sweet liquid odor of sheared grass. Her small ankles, white and unscarred, are crossed one on top of the other, as if arranged so in ritual fashion. Her feet are bare. I cannot see her face, turned toward the ground as it is, but her long black hair is lovelier than I remember it, spilling across her back and down onto the felled stalks like a pour of glossy tar. Her flesh is smooth and cool, slightly resistant to my touch. I begin to look around me for something with which to carry her back—carry her back, I hear myself say, as if the words spoken aloud, even in a dream, will somehow make it possible. I am alone in a field, at dusk, the light leaving the way it has to, leaking away the way it has to behind a ridge of swiftly blackening hills. I lie down on the ground beside my mother under falling darkness and draw my coat over our bodies. We sleep there like that.

Near the end of my searching I came to a door. Entering, I found the story of her life, laid out like a cake on an ebony table, as if waiting there for the lost bride—pages flat and placid, blank as a lake asleep in winter. Hoping for answers, some knowledge of her, perhaps—I’m not sure what— I placed my palm upon the surface. It sank through and disappeared beneath a cloud of snowy powder.