Walking among those candles was hard for me. The city was welcoming me with the only thing that might seem familiar to me in a European city. The candles reminded me of the paper lanterns my parents and I used to place in the waters of the Motoyasu River when I was a child, together with hundreds of people who gathered for the Toro Nagashi ceremony, commending our little floating lights to guide the souls of our dead. They were beautiful memories, but I’d distanced myself from them a long time ago because they were inevitably tied to traumatic ones too, since the river had turned into something very different after the attack on Hiroshima. It became a symbol of the city’s tragedy, the place where the wounded, in flames, had thrown themselves, or where thousands of cadavers had been dumped afterward. For several days, more bodies than water flowed down the Motoyasu River of my hometown of Hiroshima, and a person could cross it by skipping from one corpse to another without even getting wet. There were so many people at the first service commemorating the explosion, and so many who wished to place their lanterns in the water that volunteers had to wade into the river up to their waists to deposit the little floating lights, and despite the river’s current that carried them off, they were so numerous there wasn’t room enough along the stretch of river near the Genbaku Dome, the only building lit up, offering a vision of its metal frame. It was the only structure that hadn’t buckled under the explosion, standing close to a mile from the center of the detonation, and being a government building, it seemed—lit up like that, destroyed but still imposing with its fleshless dome—not unlike the basilica that welcomed us from the darkness of that tiny French town. These memories were painful ones, especially given that all there was in Lyon’s river was water, no lights floating in the current, no messages written on rice paper to continue guiding my beloved parents, my neighbors, all the people who had faded away beside me in the hospital after the attack. The river in Lyon seemed to me to lack compassion, to be selfish. A river that fails to carry messages for our ancestors has always seemed to me like a waste of water’s communicative faculty.
On the second day, Jim and I went into a small boutique and bought a little music box. They didn’t have the melody I was looking for. The salesperson insisted that I buy a waltz I hadn’t ever heard before. I still don’t know the name of the piece of music. When I agreed, the salesperson didn’t want to charge me. I forgot about the box until it was time to go to sleep. I saw it on the nightstand in the hostel when I crawled into bed. I opened it. I cranked the little handle and the music trickled out. Back in New York, for months I turned that little handle every night before falling asleep. Its music brought back memories: our nighttime trek from doorway to doorway; sleeping in sheets fragrant with southern lavender, wondering if Yoro had ever fallen asleep with the same scent of purple fields; the little cuts in my fingers from shucking oyster after oyster for lunch, adding a sort of aphrodisiac element to the vigor of the steps we were taking forward; the woman who saw me crying as I sat on a step in the middle of the block and who told me to stand up, then gave me a hug before continuing on her way.
I cried bitterly on several occasions, and whenever the sorrow overtook me in a public setting, I would just sit down until it went away, because I didn’t want Jim to know how deeply the lack of traces of Yoro was consuming me, to the point where I wasn’t sure how much longer I could stand it. But the music from that little box reminded me more than anything of the strolls I took with my guide, a wizened blind man who showed me the city, its labyrinths, and what became over time the symbol of that frustrated trip: the so-called traboules, secret passageways that connect one street with another, which used to be an effective way of dodging the authorities. These hidden corridors, invisible from the outside, allowed a person to disappear and then reappear in a parallel street like magic. That’s exactly how I felt in that place because every time it seemed we were getting closer to Yoro, things suddenly emptied out, as if from one instant to the next she’d gone from being in front of me to being in a parallel street, the passageway to which I couldn’t locate. The door finally swung open and then closed again on her nonexistence, since the place we were looking for was now an empty lot, no building, nothing but a huge warren of cats.
As I was exploring my sexuality, S was the most significant person to cross my path, and she’s become a beloved friend over the years as we’ve continued to be close up to today. I met her before Jim, when connecting with like-minded people or others in my situation was as important to me as maternity.
S’s place in this story involves more than her role in my personal life. She is woven into the narrative itself, since she is the one who gave me the weapon of my crime, the matériel of my offense, and something far more crucial besides. My first intention is that the reader who is not you, sir, may have the chance to know S, since besides being a wonderful friend and the element who brings my story to a close, she is one of the most fascinating women I’ve ever met.
It was the season of rains in Japan. I remember I had just turned twenty-two. The rain was falling in that slanted way that makes an umbrella useless. I found refuge in an archway to avoid getting drenched, telling myself it would be the last time I ran out of the apartment in a storm like that. But then I recalled the Tokyo apartment I was living in at that time, nearly bare, and on second thought I figured nothing could be worse than staying inside those four dreary walls. I couldn’t have been more than five minutes on that corner when a wheelchair-bound neighbor came up behind me and rudely ordered me to move along and stop making puddles with my sopping clothes. “No problem,” I responded, “at least I can walk,” and I took off. I hadn’t noticed the presence of someone else there, S, who mentioned when we were outside that if I wanted to get out of the rain, she could show me a business that was to have its grand opening shortly, but that was meant to be clandestine. She piqued my curiosity and I accepted the invitation. When I discovered the nature of her business, in that time and place, a humble neighborhood in Tokyo, it felt like setting foot on another planet.
It was a five-minute walk down a few streets. Houses made of brownish wood, mostly two-story structures, lined either side of the street. The street was so narrow you could peep straight into the facing one, in the style of a ferret sniffing out the interior spaces, nests of atmospheric and corporal humidity. The humidity revealed itself in little clusters of sweating moss growing between the wooden planks in the corners. I stopped to observe one. The moss stored water in its rhizoid down, and as I looked closely at it, I thought of it as a domestic kind of dew that had nothing to do with the crisp cold outside. I brought a bit of the murky green to my tongue and it tasted exactly like wet skin. S saw me do it. At first I felt a little shy, as if I had been caught in an extravagance, but then she tasted a little piece of moss too. As we walked along we tried other mosses, terrestrial and scratchy, that resisted disintegrating in my mouth. I chewed these as if ruminating on what type of place S was taking me to.