The Dead Are More Visible Read Online Free PDF Page B

can’t recall the reason. But the other professor, Okubo I think he was named—”
    “That’s it—Dr. J. Okubo.”
    “He was against the war. He was a pacifier, in the university. So, he was imprisoned as well, but throughout the wartime, by the imperial government. And then in the big firebombing, his wife and children were killed. I can’t recall how many children now. Maybenot his wife. But the children, yes—maybe three. It changed him. And the later bombings too …”
    “Hiroshima,” I said, “and …”
    “ Sō desu . He began to write books, history books, novels and the poetry, even this language book you use. He said Japan was not the aggressive one, but a victim. At the American occupation, they called him the whitewasher and forced him to depart the universe.”
    “University.”
    “Of course. But he kept on writing.”
    “I suppose Japan was a victim,” I said. “You can be a bully and a victim.”
    “Aliens would weaken the purity of the Japanese race and culture, he believed. He believed the aliens should not remain here.” She paused for a moment. “I think that both of those professors have now passed along. I have not heard of that book for a long time. Difficult to find, I think.”
    “I’ve gotten to like it. Most of the time, it seems completely normal.”
    “That’s Japan,” she said.
    “That’s any place,” I said.
    We fell asleep and I only woke at dawn, with Ikuko (her first name, which, out of respect for her wishes, I never used aloud) wrapped around me. She was warm and smelled wonderful. It took some time to disentangle myself so I could get up and clumsily dress and rush out to hail a cab to the station. She didn’t see me to the door. Nor did she say goodbye. As the gloom ofa wet December dawn crept through the apartment, she pretended to sleep, her face turned into the pillow and hidden by her hair and her hand.
    Lesson 12
    As the sun rose on that summer morn, the city lay in ruin, with the dead all about. The survivors felt a loneliness so great, words may not describe it .
    Omoikiru
    On the long flight east over the Pacific, passing under the sun and abridging the day, then the night, I skimmed through the final lessons of Japanese for the Beginners and Those Who Would Be More . I was exhausted, but sleep was nowhere. At one point I took Yukon’s rose of yellow leaves from my carry-on bag. I was trying to keep it fresh in a baggie; it was already starting to wilt. On airline postcards showing a tiny 747 leading a vee of Canada geese across a clear autumn sky, I wrote a note to Eguchi and, care of the school, to Yukon.
    The professors’ final lesson was equipped with the usual vocabulary lists, lexically obsolete dialogues, and ordinary sentences alternating now and then with odd ones. The living mourners remained, yet the house seemed empty with the corpse gone off . Now and then I was distracted by the in-flight film —Working Girl —but as I reached the book’s last pages, my attention quickenedat the sidebar definition of a verb I’d encountered on several occasions, never grasping the meaning. I’d meant to ask Eguchi about it. Omoikiru , the sidebar explained, is a compound verb formed out of the infinitives omou , “to think,” and kiru , “to cut.” Therefore, “Omoikiru” has the meaning: “to cut off all thought of something”; “to surrender the hope”; “to resign oneself to the inevitable.” I put my head back, closed my eyes and wondered—what else?—how I and billions of other non-Japanese speakers had ever gotten by without the word. For example: To see again those I have cared for is impossible; there is no help for it but to “cut off all thoughts.”

[ A RIGHT LIKE YOURS ]
    He is short but he has shoulders and I think he wears the flattest shoes going, cheap sneakers of some kind, and that is attractive, that he doesn’t try to elevate himself in any way. His look is shy though, maybe cold, with green eyes that don’t