I was pleased with the results of the first operations. Anorgasmically satisfied, since because the glans was no longer there, the doctors couldn’t construct a clitoris, though I found it psychologically less damaging than having orgasms with a member I didn’t recognize. Anyway, you should know that I do reach climax now, thanks to another procedure a few years later, in which they recovered what appeared to be, and was, the internal segment of my clitoris. So now I can say that I’ve had orgasms as both sexes. It was a long and painful process, but I was satisfied, though over time and as an adult I had to admit that the bomb had been a little hasty. If only it had been detonated ten years later, I could have enjoyed the presence of a child in my life. That loss still causes me to grieve today.
There’s something else I need to mention. After you have read all I’ve already written, this may seem petty to you, but it’s not minor to me. There’s a masculine feature the hormones couldn’t treat: baldness. By the age of twenty I had to wear a wig. I’ll never really know if my hair loss is due to premature male-pattern baldness or simply a side effect of radiation exposure. Whatever the case, it has always been a sign of decadence to me. I’m able to deal with it a little better now, though I never allow anyone to see me without my hair, or I guess I should say without some other woman’s hair.
It’s not just the sexual differentiation disorder that I find so hard to explain. I’ve long seen myself as a woman, and thanks to the hormone treatments and operations, I don’t think anyone finds ambiguity there. What I have trouble talking about is my body itself, from my hair follicles down to the marrow of my bones. How can I prepare you, Jim, to accept and desire me? And the hardest thing of all is something else. Something I’m still not sure how to articulate convincingly, for you to absorb not with your brain but with that other part of you, whatever it is, that allows us to empathize, to actually feel another person’s pain. What distresses me the most is that I’ll never be a father or a mother. I’ve been denied that forever. It’s a hard fact to swallow, so much so that it’s become a part of my identity, like a coarseness of the soul that I can pinpoint in my half-uterus, an organ whose dysfunction was decided in the first few weeks in my mother’s womb. In my case, a specific form of congenital adrenal hyperplasia arrested the indetermination of the hermaphrodite embryo that we all are in those early weeks. Neither male nor female. Both male and female. But beyond my biological makeup, there’s me, the woman that I am. I began aching for a child a few years after the bomb. At first it was just a wish, but over the following years a strong urge to get pregnant gripped me, and I still feel it today, feel it so powerfully that I’d exhaust whatever resources at my disposal to find a way to procreate.
For years I was called a hibakusha, but if I had to give myself a name it would be the nuclear parturient, because the morning that B-29 dropped Little Boy on my city and on me, I was impregnated with an atomic baby that I could feel but couldn’t see, the nightmare of a pregnancy that went beyond a nine-month gestation, one that lasted a lifetime.
I remember my days as an adolescent masturbating my penis for lack of a clitoris, and can’t help wondering if it might have allowed me to beget the desired child, since the penis was livelier than my ovaries. I had testicles, amenorrhea, mammary hypertrophy, and seminal vesicles, which meant I was designed to be a father. But the bomb exploded too soon and carried my penis away, my child, when I was too young to want to be a mother or a father. If I could go back in time, I think I would have chosen to be a father then, to be a father and then a mother.
I’m going to interrupt Jim’s letter here, now that I’ve touched on the most important points, to go back to something that happened with S, my friend, whom you’ll get to know in the coming pages. It took place in 2008, the last time I was in Japan, though I didn’t realize then it would likely be the last time I’d ever visit the land of my birth.
S and I had gone to see Okuribito, a film by Yojiro Takita. One of the first scenes struck me as being incredibly coincidental. The young protagonist, together with his teacher, was about to conduct an improvised nokanshi ritual. In Japan, the nokanshi is the person who prepares the body of the deceased following the Nokan ceremony, which involves caressing, massaging, and washing the body with a warm soft sponge and is meant as a double gesture of tenderness, at once a goodbye and also a welcoming. At the start of the film, the apprentice prepares the lifeless body of a beautiful young girl before the family. The young girl seems nearly alive, since she killed herself in a relatively gentle way, using carbon monoxide. The nokanshi admires the corpse’s face. He begins caressing it. But they weren’t just any caresses. We watch him softly press her eyelids, her cheekbones, her chin, as if to relieve the tension in the tiny muscles. Then he takes a wrist and pushes the rigid palm of her hand back, as if helping her stretch, preparing her extremities for physical exercise. Her body seemed to be relaxing, which made it hard to relate those exchanges with death. In fact he seemed to be preparing her for an awakening. The awakening of death, which is like the awakening of life. This is the manner in which Jim woke me up even before I had opened my eyes. The gentle touches that rouse someone from sleep are the same as those that encourage a rigid body toward death.
The next scene in the film contained the coincidence that surprised me so much because it referred so precisely to one of the chapters in my own life. The nokanshi covered the body with a kind of quilt, below which he removed the young girl’s kimono, always under the watchful eye of the family. This allowed him to place his hand below the quilt and wash the girl’s skin without anyone’s seeing the naked body. The nokanshi dipped a small sponge in a vessel of steaming water at the girl’s head, then introduced it below the cloth at chest level. He began washing the body. You could see the warm fingers working underneath the fabric, like a tiny animal stealthily burrowing a tunnel under the surface. But the hand stopped just below the belly. The little animal found something and palpated it, trying to identify what it was. Without a doubt it was a penis. The penis surprised the nokanshi, who looked in amazement at the unmistakable face of the young girl, her feminine features, the long hair. Suddenly he grasped why she had committed suicide.
I think that kind of wordless sudden comprehension of the rationale for a stranger’s suicide, arrived at merely through contact with the body, was the kind of awareness I’d always looked for. Instantaneous sensitivity like that would have saved me from having to write that letter to Jim, for example. I’m unable to communicate some things through words. They can be shared only nonverbally, perhaps by way of an endoscope. It’s not a metaphor. It’s an endoscopy. I open my legs and speak with my mouth shut. So I think about placing a camera inside a surgical tube inserted into my vagina up to my uterus. Everyone whose understanding I need—meaning you too, sir—are seated in a room. The micro-camera moves around the neck of my uterus, projecting an image on a domed screen all around us. We are the camera. Right now everything we see is pink. A pink tunnel. At the end of the tunnel is the resolution, the awareness of my conflict. But for now we wait. A pulse beats ever closer. The sound isn’t coming from my genitalia or from the monitor where I see the pink walls, but from on high; it’s the bomb cutting through the air as it falls. I see little numbers on the artifact indicating its weight—over four tons. I know the B-29 had difficulty at takeoff, and as a result the team had to arm the weapon in midflight. So I see the hand of the last man to touch it, Morris R. Jeppson. The hand doesn’t shake, but the man is afraid. Maybe Jeppson doesn’t recognize the umbilical cord that’s hanging from the bomb. Looking upward, I follow the umbilical cord. It’s very long, some 31,000 feet. It tickles my womb. On one side, there’s the bomb about to drop; on the other, there’s me, waiting. We’re all waiting along the umbilical cord suspended from the sky, from a bomb that is approaching and in its free fall through the air begins to make out a block of uneven streets. As it advances in a nosedive, it starts to comprehend Hiroshima. To comprehend me. So I want the cord to dock in my uterus. I see the epicenter of the detonation and understand the sudden incineration of the void: a baby’s spinal column sucks in everything around it with the tides of a vortex. A spine without marrow. Empty. Suddenly I comprehend the emasculating bomb, which fell to sever my penis, to cremate my desire, my child. It was Monday, the sixth of August, 1945. The bomb fell hard and fast, early, cutting through the sun-filtering clouds. At exactly 8:16:43 A.M. my newly deceased baby began to cry.