What I didn’t know was that my so-called psychological pregnancy would initiate a journey that began in Japan and would end in Africa. Here was the speedy head of a spermatozoon—the atomic bomb of Hiroshima—and over there its little tail—a fire in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Thousands of victims of the first atomic bomb on this side; a few deaths by fire on the other in a land where cadavers pile one on top of the other daily from hunger, from slavery, from illness, until their number matches the number of victims of the bomb. From wartime Japan to contemporary Africa, a seventy-year span outlined by this sperm-comet whose current flows from the Japanese genocide to where I am now in this African land, sweeping me along with it together with shrapnel from the bomb itself. I take in the view here of life spread across the continent where the first human was born only to die, over and over again.
I once heard a forestry expert say that woodland trees are not individual beings, but units that together form an organism that exchanges carbon dioxide and nitrogen underground through bulbs, mushrooms, and roots. The breath of one tree comes from the lungs of another. A tree’s quality of life and longevity depend on the others around it. My life is rooted in Jim’s story, and his life bears the marks of mine. Jim and I were—are—part of the same rhizome, trees connected through the first atomic mushroom. The weapon planted us in the same forest when it was christened seven months after they boarded Jim on the Oryoku Maru, changing history, touching my life in such a peculiar way that today it’s still hard for me to describe things from the distance I read in historians’ accounts. They don’t move me in their writing; they don’t affect me. There’s no sting when I read a history book, and I find it difficult to understand how anyone can try to explain a war without its causing heartache or provoking empathy. Historians like to say it’s being impartial, but pain can be communicated from impartiality too. I call it indifference, which means being partial to the victors, doing them a service. Doing you a service. Just a few pages into my testimony and already I’ve forgotten that I’m writing mostly to you.
Well then, allow me to explain why I don’t like history books, since this story on the whole is about history. At some point you’ve no doubt heard an eyewitness to some great historical event say things on the order of “I was born to bear witness for other people.” History with a capital H could be said to have imbued his or her life with a sense of purpose. Well, sir, that is not my case. I didn’t survive Hiroshima to bear witness. I survived Hiroshima because it was my duty to survive; this is why my mother brought me into this world, to observe what is in front of me, whether it be a bomb or a flock of sheep nibbling some peaceful green pasture. So simple, and yet not everyone can admit it. People need spectacular missions. Someone born in a tiny village in Provence decides it’s a tedious place. What kind of mission is it to wake up and see the same rocks every day? So he or she decides to study the Spanish Civil War. Then come a few trips to Spain and conversations with survivors. The tender small-town soul can’t abide such cruelty and a tear spills over a cheek, so she reads more books, let’s say several books, and the rest of her life is devoted to writing paragraph after paragraph from the lens of the side she has chosen to champion. She found her source of meaning. Research. Spread the word. Maybe that’s the historian’s ambition after all, to act as a messiah of information. And that’s all well and good, sir, it’s needed.
But let me tell you something else. This kind of so-called history isn’t worth a plugged nickel if it isn’t written from the emotion of universal pain. A war is much more than statistics, body counts, lists of atrocities. A war is a gaping wound in a human being’s sense of dignity; it’s a defect, a congenital deformity that expresses a failure of humanity. The historian who hasn’t lived through the episodes he or she is narrating should be writing from feelings of shame and compassion. Of course I could write a chapter on Hiroshima, not because it’s my birthplace, but because even as a child I could sense this human defect stealing into everyday life until it detonated into a Hiroshima, a Vietnam, or another tributary of the mighty river of war. I swear to you: a tree is not a single being. One tree’s breath comes from the lungs of another. Until a historian realizes this, his students appropriately will go on hating his classes, and what’s worse, forgetting them entirely. So I’ll try to give my own account, far removed from the detachment of a library-writing historian, as I lived through the events in the trenches, so to speak. I’m not sure whether I was on the winning or the losing side, and frankly I couldn’t care less. What I do know is that I lived my time in the first person, which gives me an advantage over those who find themselves in the dusk of their lives believing they participated in their time on earth because they read the Sunday paper.
As I said, a few months after Jim was boarded onto the ship, the history-altering baptism took place. It was August 6, 1945. The creature had no hands to bear arms, yet annihilated more than two hundred thousand lives that day; no mouth and yet it blew houses, trees, and factories to oblivion in a single breath. Conceived outside of any human warmth, it melted steel, cremated parks, pets, and pigeons. They hadn’t given it a gender either, but they did give it a name—Little Boy—and at 8:15 on a cloudless August morning, they unleashed that device over Hiroshima.
Before it was born, before it was christened with its name, Little Boy was no more than an abstract pattern in the brains of countries competing against one another to decipher it. It was so powerful and it changed my identity so drastically that for a long time I thought of it as a living being, and not of the men who created it. I imagined its gestation, how it could perceive the brain waves moving to and fro among the rival scientists racing to finish it. How it let itself be carried along the electrical currents, gliding through the neural pathways of the era’s most brilliant physicists. Often I fantasized about using the image of a CAT scan in which sections of the successful brain were illuminated, the one that discovered the formula, won the race, the sharpest of them alclass="underline" J. Robert Oppenheimer’s. And I imagined how his little organic lantern, his firefly, must have stimulated the pleasure circuits in the satisfied physicists’ brains, whose intelligence had impregnated North America with Little Boy, its favorite son (or daughter?), the atomic bomb that defended the Allies in those difficult hours and, crucially, allowed them to win the war.
Since I was still so young and immature those first few years, I personified the bomb as an extension of my own identity, but eventually I shuffled the weight of responsibility to where it belonged: the man, the manifold who were capable of creating and detonating what is still the most lethal weapon known to humanity. But I don’t want my story to linger on these well-known facts. Allusions to the event are meant only as a backdrop over which something personal is being highlighted. If I can be so extravagant as to imagine a victim whom the bomb benefited, then I’m that victim. I forfeited limbs, whole chunks of my flesh, and my relatives, and though nothing could ever compensate me for these losses, I gained other important things. So my life is poised between grief over what the bomb took from me and celebration over something marvelous it gave me.