1 April 2022 / Hiroshima
Dear AT,
What kind of river is the River Jordan? I suspect it’s one of pages, forked by each new field of tongues. The kind of river that delivers paper boats and wooden birds, disentangled and discontinuous.
Let me tell you about the first book I truly loved: it was a red-rimmed, cloth-covered volume, penned by an unknown number of authors and compiled by many more. Its pages were stained with the strawberry juice that clung to my fingers in reading, sitting beside my sister with her red, tender cheeks and one fist clenched in her pocket. We read, together, about acacia gardens and marble mausoleums, our mouths suckling the solvent from the dirt beneath our nails. I worried, later, about the seawater gathering in my sister’s belly; I was anxious it would weigh her down as she traveled up to heaven.
There is an unread book. In it, God sobs, repentant, for the agony to which he banished his loveliest children. Eve–with squid-ink hair and spotted skin–falls in love with an altruistic stranger who holds her close for a month or more before she disappears completely. Adam is an ordinary boy; each night in the persimmon grove he hugs his father and wonders if it hurts to die. He’s tortured by the desire burning in his abdomen; he’s wise enough to know that there is laughter in forgetting.
This book sits on my shelf, its stories not yet unmoored from the language of its author. In that hour between eleven and midnight, I sometimes think of abandoning the book beside an undiscovered tributary of the River Ota. There, a child of a war-torn nation will cover the volume with dried camellia and leave it unsung for another century.
As for me, I’ll prance happily, joyfully indifferent to the changing shores of memory.
Sincerely,
H