Millie Creightonthe back, and her back was completely burnt. In appearance at least,
the front of her body did not seem much affected. Her chest area and
breasts were normal, or appeared normal, despite the sense of intense
burning and soon-to-be scar tissue that would cover the back of her
body. So, when the child screamed for the breast, she tried to give it to
him. She felt like she could give it to him and could have him drink. If
he had, if he could have just done that, perhaps he would have, could
have lived. This was the feeling the woman had to suffer with as her
own life continued, for the child did not suck. Although he wanted
the breast and cried to suck her breasts, which were fine and which
had milk that could have nourished him, the child did not suck. De-
spite his pleas and efforts at the woman’s breast, he could not suck
because the inside of his mouth was too burned to allow for this. So
the agony for the woman was intensified by the sense that she should
have, could have been able to do something; she should have, could
have saved him, but at the same time she could not. This child of hers
also died in front of her eyes.
Now, as the good ethnographer, what was I to do with this story
from the field? It did not seem to fit into my research on silk weaving
and the commoditization of leisure-travel tourism packages for con-
temporary Japanese women at all. Should I have decided that it did
not fit the research agenda, and therefore that there were no relevant
collectible facts to be gathered from it? Should I have stopped the in-
formant’s narrative and gotten her back “on topic.” Should I have
tried to determine if the new “facts” were replicable? From a literary-
analysis perspective, I could note a step-by-step displacement of the
teller of the tale from the tale itself. It started out as a story about her-
self and her relationship with her mother, then turned into the moth-
er’s story—from which the storyteller already seemed absent, and then
into the story of some woman. In the end, it was the story of a woman
who lost her children to death in the atomic bombing, as many did,
as many continue to do in other forms of bombing around the world.
At some point, as I listened to this story, I thought of one of the stat-
ues at the Hiroshima Peace Park of a mother, bent over, with her two
children clinging to her back, as she is engaged in the post-bombing
struggle of helping them all survive.