Nine Stones
The Go board was already there waiting for me when I came downstairs. Two polished wooden bowls were on either side of the board, one filled with white stones made from clam shells and the other filled with black stones of polished slate. Otōsan was there too, studying the empty board. This was his way of telling me that he wanted to play, or, as I thought of it then, that he felt obliged to give me a lesson. I walked over to the living room layered with tatami mats and swiveled my legs under the low table to face him and the board. Otōsan dipped his hand into the bowl of black stones and rustled the playing pieces. He always did this between moves. It made a sound like water running over cobblestones and it helped us think.
Otōsan placed nine of my black pieces in a set order around the board – four corner stones, four side stones, and one in the center. This is usually the largest possible handicap in Go. I had been playing Otōsan for almost five months, and finally, I had started to win games. If I could beat Otōsan once more, I could move on to an eight-stone handicap – one stone closer to equaling his skill. His hand moved to the bowl of white pieces and I tried to guess his first move.
The Fox Gate
Ten feet down the mountain trail, the crowd parted and the men ran back towards Shinya, lugging the giant ark. It took twenty of them to shoulder the load. Those in front gripped thick, knotted ropes and dug their sandaled feet into the earth, pulling like oxen. They wore strips of white loin cloth tied around their waists, chests bare and steaming in the cool night. Piles of wood blazed along the sides of the trail, and priests led the way with flaming torches that sloughed off embers onto their backs and feet. Smoke wove between trees in the surrounding forest.
Kagutsuchi was awake. She raged within the ark and urged the men up and down the mountain trail. Shinya worried that if for just one moment this god of fire became unsatisfied with the ceremony, she would lift up the cover of the ark, place her gnarled lips to the crack, and blow on the fires, sending flames licking up tree trunks, capturing everyone on the side of the mountain within a wall of burning wood.
Even at a young age, he knew those who carried the ark. Many of them lived in his town. On the night of the festival though, they were changed men.
I. Andrew
The city bus jerked and chugged through the streets, and I counted down the stops to Hiroshima. Bodies packed the vehicle far beyond capacity, and I had to squeeze through the standing passengers with my fare in hand to exit at the front of the bus. An older Japanese man sitting just behind the driver squinted and stared at me. If I had known Japanese, I would have told him that my parents had both rallied for peace all their lives and that none of my grandparents had ever held a gun, so he should pick someone else to stare at.
I nodded to the driver and stepped out onto the curb. The Atom Bomb Dome loomed in front of me, and I approached slowly, like someone walking over plots in a graveyard. They rebuilt the whole city after the bombing, except for this one building, and even after decades of rain and wind, the scarred, blackened metal of the dome looked like it had just been attacked yesterday. Against the shine of the new glass and metal of the surrounding buildings, this ruin looked like a wounded stub of an amputated limb. Brick and mortar hung in ragged clumps like dead skin.
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