nagasaki blues

By the time we’d caught the last train of the night we’d already been lost a half dozen times, each time bailed out by locals who saw confused Americans and took action. It was the first trip into the city of Nagasaki itself, and it had been marked by several wrong turns and hours spent wandering the city. Of course, once we’d found ourselves things were easy enough — yakitori and a bar full of Russian hookers (an accident, I swear) made the night a memorable one.

So, despite the countless screw-ups, we’d made it into the city and were well on our way back. I felt a vague sense of liberation. We were free-spirited travelers. 150 percent energized!  I am convinced that if you move quickly enough — and it takes some real intensity, I will admit — you can outrun your mind and  leave it hanging in the dust, momentarily abandoning the melodramatic worries that inhabit the dark corners of the brain. This is therapy, and you should try it.

Then the train stopped. Not in Kazusa, but somewhere around 40 kilometers north of it. In a brutal show of professional insensitivity, the conductor explained that the train stopped here for the night, then proceeded to wish us good luck in finding a hotel.

We had no car, little money, and no chance of finding a hotel this far in the middle of nowhere.

What could we do? We started walking.

No phones and nobody to turn to. Again, we were to rely on the Japanese locals to save our hides, and this time it didn’t feel like such a gamble. A while into the walk, Paul suggested we hitchhike.

Young people, we reasoned, were more likely to pick us up. People in trucks were even more likely. Something about the separation between driver and passenger would be reassuring, right? Right. Did we need a sign? Is the thumbs-up signal international?

Speaking out of zero experience, I voiced the question: “Will they understand the thumbs-up thing to be asking for a ride? Maybe they’ll think we’re just congratulating them on their driving skills.”

“I’m sure they’ll understand.”

“I don’t know. I heard that sometimes in other countries it’s a different hand motion. I think I read that somewhere. I don’t know.”

“Someone’s pulling over.”

A black pick-up had swirved past us and then pulled over, cigarette smoke wafting from its interior and punctuated by reggae beats. Our potential saviors were two young guys no older than us, one of whom wore sunglasses and bobbed his head below a dangling marijuana-leaf air freshner. ”We’re going to Kuchinotsu,” I explained, “but we don’t speak Japanese well.” The driver nodded gravely, then turned to the passenger. The two exchanged rapid-fire Japanese while Paul and I listened on:

“What are they saying? Do you know?” Paul asked.

“No. Maybe. Well, no. Probably not. Something about how it’s out of the way. One wants to take us a few miles at least.” I interrupted the driver to ask where they were going. Nowhere, he told me.

I turned back to Paul. “He says they’re bored. They’re just cruising around.”

“Makes sense. There isn’t shit-else to do out here.”

So we hopped into the back of the truck, packs tucked under our heads, and proceeded to lazily watch Nagasaki whip past us the truck sped alongside the ocean. I’m sure it doesn’t sound special second-hand. I understand and appreciate that fact. But just try to imagine this with me, okay? Your day has been long. You have just made a major break-through. Part of you — a little part, but a portion nonetheless — is starting to believe that, perhaps, you are unstoppable. The ocean is at your back, close enough to hit with a rock, and the salt air tassles your hair.  In front of you is Unzen, a massive active volcano. Even though you know it’s just a low-hanging cloud, you allow yourself to believe that you can see smoke rising from its summit.

And then, at some point, you realize you’re close to home. You realize that the drivers have taken you all the way there, despite their insistance on driving you only a few short miles before going home themselves.

This is because when you help someone, you gain a little bit of ownership over them. Once you’ve started an act of kindness, the compulsion is to see it through. Those who speak freely of the sorry state of the human soul seem to forget that these things occur on a daily basis. Occasionally, it’s easier to do right than wrong. Paul jumped from the back of the car, dictionary in hand, and said: “Are you hungry? We’ll buy food.” They shook their heads, laughing. “Beer? Let’s get a beer.” Again they declined.

Then they left. We were less than a mile from home. We put one foot in front of the other and went home.

They burn their trash here.

My neighbor is the first to explain this to me, and in Japanese he says, “combustables go here,” pointing to an obnoxious bright red trash bin. It just pops out: “Everything’s combustable at a hot enough temperature,” I tell him, and he shakes his head. He doesn’t understand English.

So, they burn the trash. The smoke rises in thick columns and hangs in the air like jazz notes, dissipating in the early evening and leaving in its wake an acrid smell of melting plastic and burning paper. I suspect that if you live here long enough, if you’re accustomed to this phenomenon, it becomes as inevitable as train whistles and earthquakes: something you simply stop noticing. Anything to have it gone, I suppose. Torch it and move on.

Today is August 9th, and it’s the first time in my life that I’m acutely aware of the fact that this is the anniversary of Nagasaki’s atomic bombing. It seems somehow appropriate to begin here.

Robert Lewis co-piloted the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima, and as he stared from the cockpit at the blooming mushroom cloud that signaled that city’s destruction, he claimed to have tasted atomic fission. It tasted like lead, he later said, and he immediately inscribed the following words in his diary: My God, what have we done?

Humanity, I am sad to report, is not quick in learning the consequences of its actions; three days’ time was hardly enough for us to reflect on the pure scale of the violence we had unleashed with the dropping of a single bomb. Nagasaki was incinerated in turn.

The problem is that nothing ever truly burns away, of course. Einstein knew this. Energy is conserved. This rather basic principle, so grand in its simplicity, is a large part of the reason the bomb actually worked, after all.

On my way home from the grocery store today, I could almost taste it myself. I almost convinced myself I could hear the humming of B-52 engines in the sound of waves crashing against rocks. The water is higher today than it was yesterday, and yesterday was higher than the day before. It’s as if it’s piling up with all that we try to discard, every little thing that every single person pushes out of sight and out of mind. One day, I swear to God, it’s going to overflow. It’s going to break walls and drown multitudes and instill in men some primal fear that we have long forgotten.