The atomic mother-in-law

by David Benjamin

“… I couldn’t help anyone because I… was seriously injured. My entire face and both of my hands were burnt. I went home to Midori-machi stepping over the bodies of the injured and the dead. They looked like forgotten baggage…”  

—Woman quoted in  The Witness of Those Two Days: Hiroshima & Nagasaki

MADISON, Wis. — Perhaps my favorite memory of my mother-in-law, Ma Yoshida, is when she lost her mind. 

She was in her seventies. She had by then survived the A-bomb attack on Hiroshima, had raised two daughters and lost one, Mariko, to cancer at the age of 41. She had stoically shouldered the challenge of raising Mariko’s two sons and, after they had left the nest, had taken on the chore of caring for her husband, whose health, balance and disposition had deteriorated after a series of mini-strokes.

Pa Yoshida’s increasing dependency, punctuated by falls and injuries, was the last straw. Ma Yoshida sank into a sudden, profound, impenetrable depression that was all the more alarming because she had been, all her life, a bundle of purposeful energy. When neither family nor doctors could rescue Ma Yoshida from her slough of despond, she ended up in the mental ward of a little hospital in the neighboring town of Ofuna.

My wife, Junko and I, were dubious about the joint. The hospital was run-down and gloomy, more suited—we thought—to worsening, rather than dispelling, a bad case of the blues. For a while, our fears lingered. But, within a month, regardless of her medical care and true to the family ethos, Ma Yoshida had thoroughly mapped the territory, interrogated the staff, visited every room and determined that she had more on the ball than any of her fellow nut cases and, for that matter, half the nurses and even a few of the resident shrinks. 

Ma Yoshida took over the joint. She spent her last few weeks there—before they kicked her out for being the candy-striper from Hell—assisting the nurses, raiding the kitchen, flirting with the doctors and holding long, gossipy “therapy” sessions with the patients, whose biographies she had gotten to know better than their own families.

After a long vacation from Pa Yoshida (who survived her absence), she returned home with a fresh perspective, an adventure to remember and a renewed patience with her husband’s trials. This rejuvenation reflected the adaptability that had carried Ma Yoshida through most of her 93 years. 

She had been raised in comfort in Yamaguchi, just west of Hiroshima. As a girl, she was regarded as ojo-sama, a sort of bourgeois princess destined for a ladylike education and an arranged marriage to a socially acceptable young man. 

But then there was a war. 

So, instead of continuing to study at her exclusive girls school in the heart of Hiroshima, Kiyoko was assigned to a weapons factory on the city’s edge, to help in her nation’s war effort. Except, by August 1945, there were no parts, no materials, no steel—nothing to do at the factory. This is why, on 6 August 1945, Kiyoko’s girlfriend and fellow factory hand hesitated to board an already overcrowded train. Kiyoko replied that if they waited for the next train, they would be late to punch in. The other girl said, “What’s the difference? There’s no work to do!”

But Kiyoko was a lifelong fuss-budget. She couldn’t be tardy. She squeezed herself and her friend onto the packed train and left a station that would come to be known, thenceforth and forever, as Ground Zero. A moment later, everything and every person for hundreds of yards around were vaporized.

Some people dodge bullets. Kiyoko Yoshida dodged an atomic bomb.

She saw the mushroom cloud from the window of the factory’s locker room and wondered what it was. Work was called off, the trains stopped running, and Kiyoko headed back to her dormitory on foot. She has always referred to that ghastly journey as a “walk through Hell.” 

She passed people who staggered violently and fell at her feet, their scorched flesh hanging in strips, as though they’d been skinned alive with blowtorches. She saw people boiled to death in the Ota River. She heard people inside collapsed buildings, trapped and screaming as the relentless fire consumed them. 

Ma Yoshida rarely talked about that day, and never for long. She evinced the sort of PTSD silence common to combat veterans and Holocaust survivors, whose desperate need to forget overwhelms the duty to testify. 

Kiyoko grew up suddenly that day. But her most enduring quality is that she preserved, somewhere inside, the lissom schoolgirl who had elbowed her way onto the last train out of Hiroshima. She retained a spark of independence and a touch of mischief that occasionally twinkled in her eyes. She passed this subtle impertinence on to both her daughters, to Mariko gone too young, and to Junko, who married a gaijin and took off around the world. At first (wisely), Ma Yoshida regarded me, the beikokujin buttinsky, with a deep mistrust. This faded only slowly. I won her over finally when my commentaries on sumo started appearing in a national weekly magazine, Shukan Bunshun. She started carrying copies of the latest issue, to show off to her friends. More accurately, she waved the magazine in their faces and bragged on me more than I deserved. It was only a sports column.

But boy! Nice to have her on my team.

In her last years, when she was mostly bedridden, her face would light up to see the family white guy enter her room, pale, bearded, overweight and easily distinguishable from all those dour Japanese aides and nurses who invaded her space and plagued her with needles and green Jell-O.

Ma Yoshida was a gourmet cook—the queen of tempura!—and a seamstress with few peers. Once Junko and I took her to a Sausalito boutique that featured high-priced fashions—frocks, blouses, etc.—made from repurposed kimono silk. Ma Yoshida ordered Junko to occupy the saleslady while she surreptitiously memorized the stitching on a particularly cunning and complicated waistcoat. It took her five minutes. Months later, when Junko visited Japan, Ma Yoshida presented her with a perfect duplicate (with better silk) of the $250 Sausalito vest. 

I remember a night in Paris. It was cold enough to keep even most Parisians home. Braving the chill, we took Ma Yoshida to a little Italian restaurant on the Ile St. Louis called Castefiore (it’s gone now). The bistro was almost empty when we arrived. The proprietor, a British chef whom Junko and I had known for years, had sent his help home. He waited on us personally. After we had finished, with no other customers in the place, the chef (tall and handsome) brought us dessert and sat with us.

He proceeded to charm Ma Yoshida, asking questions that Junko translated. He hoped she had enjoyed his cuisine. He scoffed in disbelief when she admitted her age. He praised her excellent taste in fashion. I sat back and watched with quiet pleasure as Ma Yoshida’s years melted away, exposing in her blushes and smiles that inner schoolgirl, that hint of playful vanity that life’s troubles—a war, a bomb, a radioactive nightmare, a daughter lost, her husband gone—had fought so hard to crush. 

When was was not exactly “sweet” sixteen, Ma Yoshida—pretty little Kiyoko—had encountered, smack-dab in the center of his atomic inferno, the Grim Reaper. But after a moment, after trembling at the slaughter he had wreaked, she kicked him in the shin and walked away—a bounce in her step and a twinkle in her eye. 

Of course, eventually, he got her. But it took him another 77 years and a few more whacks on the shin.