Hiroshima Maidens

by Rodney Barker

  *

  Waiting for her sister to get help, Toyoko Morita alternately wept and wondered, Why me? As excruciating as the pain of the burns was, a greater torment came from knowing that if it had not been for a last-minute change in plans she would have been far enough away from the center of Hiroshima to have escaped the blast.

  A week earlier there had been a knock at the door of the Moritas’ luxurious landscaped mansion and a uniformed officer had told her that the house-clearing program was being accelerated and each household was required to send a representative to a neighborhood work site the following Monday morning. Although there were nine children in the family, with her father — a wealthy banker and moneylender — bedridden with a stomach ailment, her mother evacuated to her rural hometown with the four youngest, her older brothers already enlisted, and her older sister married, that left Toyoko and her younger sister. As Toyoko had been employed since graduating from high school at an office job at the port of Ujina, a forty-minute ride by streetcar from her home where she reported for work each weekday by eight in the morning, and since her sister was a student who happened to have that day off, she thought it was obvious who would represent the family. But come Monday morning, she awoke to discover her sister had slipped away early and gone off with a friend, so it was she lying there in critical condition waiting for help.

  Soon her brother-in-law came for her with a truck, only to be told that if she were moved now she would not reach her destination alive. She was willing to take the chance, but he thought it unwise and left saying he would let her mother know where she was.

  Feeling abandoned and utterly helpless, Toyoko kept asking herself why she had been singled out for such suffering. The irony of her fate demanded an explanation, but she did not know whom to blame. Her sister for acting so selfishly? The Americans for bombing innocent, unarmed civilians? The Japanese military for waging war in the first place? She even added the Emperor to her list of guilty parties when she heard he had announced the surrender of Japan. Why had he waited so long?

  When her mother came from the country to nurse her as was the custom in Japanese hospitals at that time, she learned for the first time that the damage to their family extended beyond herself. Of their beautiful house with its central garden nothing had been left standing except her father’s safe; and in the lawless aftermath of the bombing, looters had pried open the doors and made off with his personal savings and the family jewels. Somehow her father had managed to extricate himself from the wreckage of their home and had been evacuated to their country house, but even though his physical injuries seemed slight, his health was steadily deteriorating because of a persistent fever that the doctors found impossible to identify.

  It was October before she was out of danger and well enough to travel, and although she had counted the days until the end of her confinement, when it finally came time for her to leave she panicked, for the wounds on her face had barely begun to heal. The side that had been turned away from the blast was spared to a large extent, but the other half looked as though some foul disease that rotted flesh was trying to bore its way out from the inside. While brushing her hair in preparation for the journey, she stared at her disfigurement in the mirror for the longest time. During the war years she had thought little about the implied risks to herself. In fact, although in those days the authority of the state was not to be questioned, she had flagrantly disregarded the dress code for civilian women and worn skirts instead of pantaloons, causing more than one military policeman to reprimand her. To a slender twenty-year-old who had always basked in the assurance that young men found her attractive — at eighteen she had already refused one suitor because she thought she could do better — it was an exciting time, a chance to meet soldiers and sailors before they went off to battle. This was the reason she had not followed her older sibling’s scholarly footsteps and attended a university; she was more interested in going to teahouses with girl friends and mixing with junior officers on leave from the nearby naval base. But looking at herself now, it was difficult to keep her hysteria in check.

  They took the train to her mother’s native village where the rest of the family was staying, and Toyoko took a seat nearest the window, angled so the bad part of her face pointed away from the aisle. As she stared fixedly out the window it seemed to her mother she was lost in thought, but in truth she was watching the reflection of her fellow travelers on the pane of glass and did not relax until she was convinced that no one was giving her undue notice. Surprised as much as she was relieved, she wondered if people were just too preoccupied with their own problems to mind anyone else’s business; secretly she hoped it meant she was not as startlingly ugly as she appeared to herself.

  When the train reached their stop and they deboarded through a swirl of steam and started to cross the platform, she realized she had only been fooling herself, for the villagers who had come to greet the arriving train gaped, nudging others to look. All the nervousness and anxiety that had been simmering inside boiled up, and as much to conceal her face as to hide her emotions she tucked her chin into her coat collar and trained her eyes on the ground. It was possible these people were inordinately curious because the war had not come to the countryside, and they had heard rumors about what the atomic bomb did to the survivors; but whether or not that explained why they stood and gawked long after she had scurried past, their rudeness made her want to turn and shout, “Go ahead and stare, damn you. But just wait. Before long I’ll put your oafish country girls to shame.”

  Though it had been only months, her father had aged years. He was an old and ill and broken man, and it withered her spirits to see him struggle for a smile when he first set eyes on her. Three days later he was dead, and he did not go in peace but grieving the loss of his home, a lifetime of work, and the future of his daughter.

  It was hard for all of them in the years that followed. Her mother borrowed a small section of land and started a vegetable garden so there was food on the table, and they rented a house from a relative so they had a roof overhead, which made them more fortunate than many of their countrymen; but compared to the life of luxury and leisure they had enjoyed in Hiroshima, it was a difficult existence, and for Toyoko it could not have been worse.

  Throughout her childhood they had come to this village every summer vacation and she had always looked forward to it. She liked the quaint, thatch-roofed homes that had been passed down to generation after generation of farmers, and she thought there was no sound as lovely as women singing melodiously as they weeded rice paddies on a crisp golden morning. Now, everything was different, and she hated the countryfolk for making her feel like the village freak. Children would gather when they saw her coming, and adults stopped working in their fields to watch her pass. The only time she felt wholly at ease was when she went off by herself on treks through the thick timber on the hills above the valley to gather firewood. Traipsing around the green woods brought back the summer memories, and in her complete absorption she sometimes forgot the time of day and her reason for coming, returning home in the evening darkness apologetic and empty-handed.

  Only the faith that this condition was a crisis that would pass in time kept despair at bay, and even that was beginning to seem like a miscalculation. After the scabs had come a thick rubbery overlay of a pearly luster that looked like nothing less than a crab clutching one side of her face, its claws extending up to her cheek and down to her chest. Time had done nothing to heal her scars; on the contrary, the creature they resembled seemed to gradually tighten its grip so she could no longer raise her head naturally or open her mouth wide.

  In the midst of her depression, her only defense was to conjure an image of Hiroshima as the one place on earth where people would be able to empathize with her feelings, because they had history and circumstances in common. There, she believed, she would not be fair game for the curious but could walk among fellow sufferers with a feeling of community. She had not reached the point of planning to r
eturn, however, until she read in the newspaper that Hiroshima doctors had begun to perform reconstructive surgery on badly burned victims of the A-bomb. From that moment on, all her dreams led back to Hiroshima.

  When she made up her mind to return, she trembled with anticipation, remembering the city as she had seen it last — like the ruins of an ancient civilization, the mounds of collapsed buildings the only vertical shape in an endless plain of rubble and cinders. When she stood once again in front of the railway station, two years had passed, and looking about, it struck her that in that time Hiroshima had been to hell and had not come all the way back.

  Across the wide plaza where buses and streetcars made their drop-offs and turnarounds, a congested, noisy, and obscenely fecund black market had sprung up, replacing the commercial district in the former downtown area that had been leveled in the bombing. Trying to absorb the changes all at a glance, she thought there was almost a fairground quality to the crudely carpentered stalls and booths that lined the dusty streets spoking out from the plaza, the crowds drifting past secondhand shops and fresh fruit markets, the smoke pluming out of cheap cook-shops, sending out whiffs of fish and crabs frying in oil. Nervously poised at the alleyways were “pan-pan girls,” identically painted in rouge and lipstick, keeping one eye out for customers and the other for the police, and gangster types, sporting GI haircuts and jackets tailored to resemble the tight-fitting Eisenhower jackets worn by their conquerors, who surveyed the scene behind aviator sunglasses like sentinels.

  Toyoko was beginning to feel a queer sense of dislocation when she realized that several young men loitering at the entrance to the waiting room of the station had found her worth watching. Out of the corner of her eye she thought she saw them giving her their intense scrutiny, but when she turned and looked directly at them they appeared to be busily engaged in a private conversation. Or were they just pretending to talk to each other? One of them laughed and she looked away, certain she was the butt of a joke and suddenly feeling extremely exposed. Or was she being paranoid in her suspiciousness? After a pause she glanced over again and this time caught the eye of one of the men. As it turned out they had not noticed her before, but heads turned now. Picking up her bags, she started to walk and her quick steps became a little hurry of escape, as much from the unwanted attention as from the dreadful thought that maybe she had been wrong about Hiroshima.

  Previous arrangements had been made for her to rent a room from family friends who lived on the outskirts of the city, and as soon as she was settled in, Toyoko took a bus to the hospital. It was a depressing place with dark corridors, grimy walls, and a sharp odor of disinfectant that gave a stronger impression of filth than cleanliness. Only a flower and vegetable garden in the inner compound rescued the atmosphere from total dreariness; it had been planted to test the effect of radiation on plant life. Radishes, carrots, and potatoes bulged from the ground, while Chinese bellflowers, dahlias, and early chrysanthemums were in magnificent bloom. Radioactivity apparently had a perversely stimulating effect on vegetation.

  The cheap wooden benches spaced at intervals along the hallway were filled with expressionless patients. Room was made for her, and taking a seat, Toyoko composed her hands in her lap and stared straight ahead until it was her turn to be examined. The staff surgeon, who took his time assessing the extent of her injuries, was quite different than she expected. His young face gave him the look of a serious high school student, but his clear eyes and steady hands seemed to vouch for the maturity that had come from two years of diagnosing medical problems brought on by the A-bomb. A high shelf behind him that sagged under the weight of several thousand case cards spoke too for his experience.

  All Toyoko wanted to know was, “Can you give me back my face?”

  He looked her in the eyes and replied, “Let me be straightforward with you. You may not look exactly as before, but it will be very close.”

  But it was not close. Like the orderly in the hospital who had told her earlier that her wounds were nothing more than a bad sunburn and would mend in time, he was either being kind or did not know what he was talking about. Either way, she felt cruelly deceived. Two major operations and nearly a year later, Toyoko looked no different than when she had been admitted.

  She was crestfallen, and for some time afterward did not feel like doing anything. The excitement that had expressed itself in her optimistic return to Hiroshima congealed into a big lump inside. Until now, she had not let herself think of her condition as a permanent and unalterable fact of her existence. She had refused to believe that this was the face she would look at each morning in the mirror and show the world every time she went out. As it came home to her that this might be the way it would be for the rest of her life, a kind of dullness settled slowly upon her. And even this was not the limit which she would be forced to withstand.

  When an old friend of her father who was employed in the city government offered her a position as a clerk in the social welfare office, she accepted it to shake herself out of her apathy. It was decent work at a fair salary that enabled her to support herself while she struggled with the question of what to do next. She was twenty-three, and there was so much that was still young, soft, and female alive within her; but when she honestly asked herself if any man would have a woman like her she was unable to deceive herself. Feeling the need to do something interesting and worthwhile with her life if she was never going to marry, she spent several months contemplating her future before she came up with what seemed like a reasonable and satisfying alternative. She decided to pursue the solitary life of an artist by going back to school, following up on the violin lessons she had taken as a young girl and eventually playing in an orchestra. The more she thought about it the more she liked the sound of it; filling her life with music was just what she felt she needed.

  Toyoko’s heart was set on attending the St. Elizabeth School of Music, a prestigious conservatory established in Hiroshima by Catholic missionaries, and to cover the cost of tuition she sold the silk kimonos her mother had taken to the country for safekeeping on the black market. Acting on a definite plan in which some degree of personal happiness seemed possible took her thoughts away from her condition for a while, but this did not last. She was never comfortable around her classmates; they represented life and laughter, and she could not help feeling jealous at how carefree they acted. Nor did the violin give her the pleasure it once had; in fact, in addition to music lessons she was required to take liberal arts classes and she found her philosophy class much more interesting. Her faith in God had never been the same since the bombing, and at that time an atheistic form of existentialism was popular among Japanese university students. Then, before she knew it the semester was ending and the fees for the upcoming term were due. Until the last minute she pretended that her family’s prosperity still stood behind her; but the school carried things forward on a business-like basis and when she was unable to post tuition, her name was dropped from the school rolls.

  All that Toyoko had worked to achieve had come to naught, and she felt she had exhausted the possibilities of her situation. Perhaps some could bear up with stoicism and dignity, but having been raised in affluence she had taken it for granted that comforts and conveniences were a birthright to a girl of her social standing, and nothing prepared or equipped her to cope with endless drudgery and one degradation after another as her daily bread.

  In certain morbid moods it seemed like nothing more than her death could happen, and when she asked herself, “Why do I go on living in this world?” she found herself envying her father and wondering if it would have been better if she had died with him. She had no will to live without hope, and neither did she have the nerve to take her own life, but thoughts of suicide plagued her like a sickness. Alcohol was the only thing that put a temporary stop to her suffering, less the ritual glass of sake than a bottle of whiskey which she drank in blighted, numb solemnity.

  Moved to pity and then dread by the vacant, far-away loo
k in her daughter’s eyes, Mrs. Morita tried to stimulate her interest in the future again by arranging to pay for a follow-up operation to the earlier surgery. Toyoko had reached the point where she no longer cared, but she did not have the strength to resist. At least in the hospital she was around others affected by the A-bomb.

  While waiting for surgery, Toyoko received a visit from another young girl marked by burn scars as a victim of the bombing. One morning Shigeko Niimoto simply walked into the ward and introduced herself. Toyoko could barely disguise her surprise. She had continued to ask herself why she had been singled out for this tragedy, and Shigeko was the first girl she had encountered who was branded the same way. Just as significant, Toyoko thought the poor girl’s disfigurement was worse than her own.

  They talked, and Toyoko found her new friend’s buoyant cheerfulness startling. The girl seemed oblivious to her injuries. In their conversation, Toyoko inquired delicately how she managed to keep her spirits up, and Shigeko told her that she too had been somber at one time, but she had been pulled out of her hole of unhappiness through her association with the Reverend Tanimoto. She explained that once each week girls like themselves met in the basement of his church, and she invited Toyoko to attend a future meeting.

  Toyoko’s operation did little to help her, but this time she did not despair. Her release from the hospital meant she could accept Shigeko’s invitation, and the two girls met at an agreed-upon street corner and walked together to the Nagarekawa Methodist Church. Toyoko was a little nervous and uncertain as they entered a brightly lit basement room in which a group of girls were seated on folding chairs arranged to face a man she soon came to know as the spiritual leader of the gathering. After bowing through the introductions, she was glad to take her seat.

  Over the next two hours, Toyoko came to relax in a way she had not in the seven years since the bombing. The Reverend Tanimoto read to them from the Bible and they sang hymns together, but most of all she liked the discussion period that followed when the girls talked among themselves. All had lived in a kind of dark exile since that day, and like herself, each was able to cite an odd set of coincidences that seemed to ordain their fate. A week before the bombing a girl named Atsuko Yamamoto said she had gone with several of her girl friends to have her fortune told. While some took it seriously, she had gone just for fun and the whole walk there had ridiculed the idea that anyone could peer into her future by looking at her palm. However, when the gypsy fortune teller told her, “You will be a girl whom people will turn and look at,” Atsuko had suddenly been willing to give the superstition the benefit of the doubt, for the prophecy pinpointed her ambition in life. Her father managed movie theaters, and a significant portion of her childhood had been spent sitting in her father’s theaters watching films and dreaming of becoming an actress when the war was over. She had thought the reader meant people would turn and look at her because they recognized her as a matinee idol; it was the crudest of ironies that people did now turn and look at her, but it was to stare at the angry purple welts that tore along both sides of her face in clawing sweeps from nose to ear.