What a time we had. Neither of us wanted it to end. With a crowd of bemused orang-utans looking on, with Stella interfering and chasing after every goal scored, we were at it till darkness drove us at last back up the hill. We were both too tired to do more than have a long drink of water, eat a banana or two and go to our sleeping mats.
Once at sea, the stories simply flowed. He talked a great deal of his childhood in Japan, of his twin sister and how the worst thing he’d ever done was to push her out of the tree in their garden, how she’d broken her arm, how when he painted that cherry tree it always reminded him of her. But she too had been in Nagasaki when the bomb fell.
But it was Kimi and Michiya he talked of most, about how he wished he could have seen Michiya grow up. Michiya, he said, would have been nearly fifty by now if the bomb hadn’t fallen on Nagasaki, and Kimi would be exactly the same age as he was, seventy-five. I rarely interrupted him when he was like this, but once to comfort him I did say, “Bombs don’t kill everyone. They could still be alive. You never know. You could find out. You could go home.” He looked at me then as if it was the first time such a possibility had ever occurred to him in all those years. “Why not?” I went on. “When we see a ship and we light the fire and they come and fetch me, you could come too. You could go back to Japan. You don’t have to stay here.”
He thought about it for some time, but then shook his head. “No,” he said. “They are dead. That bomb was very big bomb, very terrible bomb. Americans say Nagasaki is destroyed, every house. I hear them. My family dead for sure. I stay here. I safe here. I stay on my island.”
Day after day we piled more and more wood on the beacon. It was massive now, I longed to see a ship, of course I did. I longed to go home. But at the same time I dreaded what that would mean. I felt so much at home with Kensuke. The thought of leaving him filled me with a terrible sadness. I determined to do all I could to persuade him to come away with me, if and when a ship came.
At every opportunity now I talked to him of the outside world, and the more I talked the more he seemed to become interested. Of course, I never spoke of the wars and famines and disasters. I painted the best picture of the world outside I could. There was so much he didn’t know. He marvelled at all I told him, at the microwave in our kitchen, at computers and what they could do, at Concorde flying faster than the speed of sound, at men going to the moon, and satellites. These things took some explaining, I can tell you. Some of it he didn’t even believe, not at first.
The time came when he began to quiz me. In particular he would ask about Japan. But I knew very little about Japan, only that back home in England lots of things, including our microwave, had ‘made in Japan’ written on them: cars, calculators, my father’s stereo, my mother’s hair dryer.
“I ‘made in Japan’ person,” he laughed. “Very old machine, still good, still very strong.”
Try as I did to trawl my memory, after a while I could find nothing more to tell him about Japan, but he would still keep asking. “You sure there no war in Japan these days?” I was fairly certain there wasn’t and said so. “They build up Nagasaki again after bomb?” I told him they had, and hoped I was right. All I could do was to reassure him as best I could, and then tell him the same few things I did know about over and over again. He seemed to love to hear it, like a child listening to a favourite fairy story.
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