What Almost Happened

A One-Sentence Story

Fuji, Mountain in Clear Weather, by Katsushika Hokusai

A man who was almost my lover, but we never actually made love because I was too afraid when we finally got into bed, so we just had lunch together once in a while and some anguished conversations until I stopped loving him so much (why does that happen?), told me a story about Mt. Fuji, which was that near the end of World War II, when the American government was deciding to drop the A bomb on the Japanese, there was a lot of discussion about what the target should be, and for a while they were considering Mt. Fuji, until they consulted Ruth Benedict, the anthropologist (at least, he thought it was her), who told them that if they ever wanted to be on good terms with the Japanese, it was the worst thing they could possibly do because Mt. Fuji was such an important cultural icon that the Japanese would never forgive them, so instead they bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki—but when I repeated this anecdote to my husband, he said seriously, “That’s a good story, Grace, but it’s hard for me to imagine that a few atom bombs would do much permanent damage to a mountain.”