The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature: From Restoration to Occupation, 1868-1945: vol. 1 (Modern Asian Literature Series)

by J. Thomas Rimer

  I looked up from the diary. The commander was looking at me with eyes that seemed to hold both sympathy and familiarity. We spoke at the same moment.

  “That’s all.”

  “That’s enough.”

  This brought my interrogation to an end.

  The commander turned sideways and said in a low murmur, “We’ll get you something to eat now. Someday you’ll be able to go home.” I lay there vacantly, my spirit too tired to respond.

  One of the soldiers returned the papers to the haversack. The owner’s name stitched into the flap flashed before my eyes.

  It had belonged to K, the rakugo critic’s son, the fellow who had protested, “Aren’t we going together?” when we were preparing to evacuate the squad hut and I decided I would get a head start. My shock was immense. I turned my face away and screamed, “Kill me! Shoot me now! How can I alone go on living when all my buddies have died?”

  “Be glad to,” I heard someone say. I turned toward the voice to find a man leveling his automatic rifle at me.

  “Go ahead,” I said, spreading my chest, but my face twisted into a frown when I saw the playful gleam in his eye.

  The commander walked away as though he had never even heard my cries.

  A package of cookies fell on my chest. I looked up to see a ruddy young soldier with a dark stubble of a beard standing over me. His face was a blank. When I thanked him, he silently shifted the rifle on his shoulder and walked away.

  I resumed my observation of the American troops around me. Never before had I seen men of such varied skin tones and hair color gathered together in a single place. Most of them seemed to be off duty—though a few had work to do. A man with a mobile radio unit on his back stopped near me with the entire sky spread out behind him. He adjusted something and then moved on. One group of men was taking turns peering through what looked like a surveyor’s telescope on a tripod. Far away in the direction the telescope pointed rose a range of green mountains. Somewhere among those mountains was the ridge over San Jose where our detached platoon was camped. I gazed off at the distant range, caressing each beautiful peak, each gentle mountain fold with my eyes. The platoon could be under attack even now, I thought. I mentally reviewed everything I had said during my interrogation, trying to reassure myself I had said nothing that could be harmful to them.

  A burly, middle-aged soldier approached and took my picture. Coming closer, he said, “What’re you sick with?”

  “Malaria,” I answered.

  He felt my forehead with his hand. “Open your mouth,” he commanded. When I obeyed, he tossed in five or six yellow pills and said, “Now take a drink.” After watching me wash the pills down he explained, “I’m the doctor,” and then walked off.

  Flames rose from the hut that had housed our command post as well as from the squad hut with the sick soldiers where I had first rested the day before. I had never seen columns of flame rise so high. Perhaps the huts had been doused with gasoline to help burn the corpses of the dead.

  Evening approached. The American troops built fires in the holes I had thought might be graves and started preparing dinner. An amiable-looking youth brought me some food. I had no appetite. I merely nibbled at a cookie.

  A young Mangyan tribesman I recognized happened by. Never before nor since have I seen a face so filled with pity—which is to say, in all my life, I have never been in a more pitiable circumstance than I was at that moment. In accord with their custom, the Mangyan youth wore his hair down to his shoulders and had a red cloth wrapped around his head. His beautiful face could easily have been mistaken for a girl’s.

  Except for being awakened several times during the night to take more pills, I slept soundly.

  The next morning the commander said, “Today we return to San Jose. The troops will board ship directly south of here, but you will go from Bulalacao. Can you walk?”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  With GIs supporting me on either side, I managed to stay on my feet all the way down the mountain. Several Filipinos carried me by stretcher from there to Bulalacao, ten kilometers away. Once they had hoisted the stretcher onto their shoulders, all I could see from where I lay was the bright sky and the leafy treetops lining both sides of the road. Watching the beautiful green foliage flow by me on and on as the stretcher moved forward, it finally began to sink in that I had been saved—that the duration of my life now extended indefinitely into the future. It struck me, too, just how bizarre an existence I had been leading, facing death at every turn.

  ŌTA YŌKO

  Ōta Yōko (1906–1963), a native of Hiroshima, began her writing career as a magazine reporter in Tokyo but soon began producing short stories that earned her some acclaim. In January 1945, she returned to her native town to be with her family and escape the firebombings of Tokyo, only to be present in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped. Thereafter, she was labeled an “A-bomb” writer. In 1951 Ōta became very upset about the suicide of another author who had survived the bombing, Tamiki Hara, and she refers to him in “Fireflies” (Hotaru, 1953), the story translated here. Fearful that she herself might die of radiation sickness, Ōta worked frantically to complete her autobiographical novel of the destruction, City of Corpses (Shikabane no machi, censored version published in 1948, complete version published in 1950).

  FIREFLIES (HOTARU)

  Translated by Kōichi Nakagawa

  1

  Although I had visited the site the previous morning, I went again the next afternoon to see the stone walls of the ruined castle as they stood facing each other like the sleeves on a kimono.

  Whether they used to be one of the castle gates or part of the solid rampart, I couldn’t tell, since only the ruins remained. The obvious assumption was that unrealistic as it seemed, a section of the otherwise destroyed rampart still stood there.

  It was past noon on a June day. I was standing between the two tall stone walls. The earth under my feet was shadowed as in a valley. The wall that I was facing appeared grotesque and on fire whenever I went back to see it. The surface of each stone in the wall, big and small alike, was burning in colors of brown, rusty vermilion, and bright red. Summer grass was growing out of the cracks. Yellow flowers were blooming on the grass tips.

  There was enough room for people to walk on the top of the wall. The grass and its flowers spread over the whole top. To me this giant wall seemed to brim with a kind of impressive beauty. One of the artists from Tokyo had been struck with the idea of engraving a poem in these burned stones. He wanted to carve the words written by a poet who had killed himself. I understood his intention well enough, and yet I knew about the nightmares that this place had seen.

  I had never met the poet Tamiki Hara, but I had read the words written from his soul in “Requiem.”

  —Never live for yourself. Live only for the grief of the dead. I told myself again and again.—

  —Pierce my body, Oh, Grief! Pierce my body, Countless Griefs!—

  Several people came from Tokyo to select a place for a monument with Tamiki Hara’s poetry engraved on it. I looked at a few places with them because luckily or not, I had come to Hiroshima a couple of days before then. They all liked the radiation-burned stone wall, but I didn’t. Only Tamiki Hara and I, with the eyes and souls we had in common, should be able to see the colors of the stone wall in the castle site. The eyes and souls of the visitors from Tokyo, who had never experienced the intense light of radiation, were different.

  To me the stones seemed to burn like balls of flame. Or I thought that the stones, retaining the rays of the midday sun, were actually hot. As I had done many times before, I passed my hand over the stone surfaces, feeling for some heat. They weren’t hot, but there was a feeling of brittleness, as if they would soon crumble into fragments. The other sleeve of wall across the way, which had received the full force of the light of the bomb streaming down from the central part of the city, was burned a mottled shade of red. But the part of the wall where the surface
had not been exposed to the direct light was not red. Rather, it seemed to be deteriorated and to have taken on the calm gray of a fossil. There was sand spilling out of its broken surface.

  The wall was one and a half meters thick. If it had been a human body, it would have been burned up. I couldn’t forget the scenes in which human faces had been burned exactly like this. I thought that the Tamiki Hara poetry monument, if erected here, might take on the same flaming color as the wall. Perhaps it was merely a morbid reaction. Come to think of it, wherever I happened to be in Hiroshima, although seven years had passed since the bombing, my eyes seemed to see only masses of fire and blood everywhere.

  The shadow of dusk began to cover part of the stone walls. Evening clouds changed their shapes moment by moment. I thought about the poet who had had to take his own life and tried to relate his death to my own life and death. That was why I stood by the walls. But I had stood there too long, I realized, and I left. The place was deserted. By the moat was a slender willow tree, looking picturesque in its setting. It had caught my eye from the beginning, and I went and crouched down under it because it looked like a good spot from which to sketch the walls. I put my drawing pad on my knees and opened it. I was not good at drawing, but I somehow managed to catch the shape of each stone in the walls. And then I started writing about the colors of the stones, the green grass, and the small yellow flowers. Two men came along. I saw the light of a cigarette. The men were carrying shovels on their shoulders.

  They were probably workmen on their way back from cleaning up after the athletic exposition that had been held on the grounds of the castle site. The men squatted down at the edge of the moat and looked at me writing on my pad. Then they walked past me without a word. After they had passed, one of them turned around and asked inquiringly, “Lady?”—with a tone of sweetness—“What are you thinking about so seriously?”

  The other man turned back, too, after walking a little way past me.

  “Good evening,” he said slowly, as if suddenly remembering the expression. I nearly burst out laughing.

  “Good evening,” I replied to their backs.

  They both stopped and turned around again. Then they said from a distance, “You’re not going to jump in the moat, are you? Leave a note behind? You’re not going to kill yourself ?”

  “No, I’m not going to kill myself!”

  The men walked away laughing. I had no intention of dying the way Tamiki Hara did. And yet a lurking sense of death was always around me. I was trying to live, but on the other hand, there was always the danger of death.

  The sun was about to set. The stone walls were sinking into darkness. And yet I was able to make out each stone clearly as if it were a living being.

  I started back toward the makeshift shacks at the former military training ground, which was four or five streets from the downtown area. Turning my back on the stone walls, I began walking. It seemed as though those stone cliffs, turning into flames, were collapsing behind me. The feeling was not a false one. To me that was the ultimate truth.

  2

  While in Hiroshima, I was staying at my youngest sister Teiko’s house. The place she lived in was not what you would normally call a “house.” I didn’t know the right word for it—a shack, a barrack, some kind of little living unit appropriate to this devastated city.

  I understood that it was a makeshift affair, and yet it was not only for temporary use because my sister had been living there for seven years since the war. And it didn’t seem as though she was planning to move into a real house.

  “Just once more in my lifetime I’d like to live in a house with running water,” Teiko said. She was thirty-one years old.

  “Don’t sound so discouraged. Aren’t there a lot of people who have moved out of these shacks and built new houses somewhere else?”

  “No, almost none.”

  “Nobody? There are so many people here.”

  “I’ve never heard of its happening.”

  When the city was reduced to rubble, not a single house was left standing. The makeshift shacks were erected on the training ground, which was still strewn with the homes of numberless soldiers who had been burned to death there. It was strange to think of the shacks going up, a thousand of them in one corner of the training ground, built by the city for the relief of the survivors.

  The facilities should have been able to house everybody, since the number of survivors was not that great. But because all the older houses had been destroyed and because repatriates from abroad and discharged soldiers were pouring into the city, the shacks were soon filled up. Teiko; her husband, a junior high teacher; and her two-year-old daughter had managed to move into one of the units. That was at the end of 1946. The shack had two rooms, one designed to be floored with six tatami mats, the other with three mats. But at first the rooms were not even floored with mats because there were too many thieves and beggars around to make off with them. Teiko and her husband, Soichi, with their little daughter tied onto her back, picked their way along a small path across the desolate army field, the cold wind sweeping over them, to go to the city housing office to pick up their tatami mats. Because all the huts were built to standardized dimensions, it didn’t make any difference which mats and fixtures Teiko and Soichi picked out. They took nine tatami mats and a couple of wooden and glass doors and carried them back on their shoulders. None of the poorly made tatami mats and doors fitted properly, so they had to wedge and stuff them into place as best they could.

  There was no ceiling. The unfinished logs that served as beams formed a triangle that was open to view. Morning sunlight found its way between the wooden beams into the room. Here and there I could see the heads of nails, and I felt as though I was lying in a log cabin in the mountains. There was a tiny toilet at the end of the open veranda. It looked like something built for children—you could imagine it pushing away any grownup who tried to use it. Inside were two rough boards placed over a shallow pot which was fully exposed to view.

  And yet these were not slum dwellings. They were all separate units, with spaces in between, and there were rows and rows of them like so many long walls. No matter how harsh the circumstances, people can hardly be expected to put up with communal living for long. Here the occupants at least had their separate little roosts where they could guard their own particular secrets from one another. The lines and lines of small shacks were proof of this.

  There was only one source of water for the occupants of the huts in Teiko’s row and those opposite them. There had been a water outlet at the army horse stables, but the pipe had been broken in the bombing. Until the water pipe was repaired, all the families in all one thousand shacks had gone all the way to Sakancho to get water, walking across the training grounds and over Aioi Bridge, right through the area where the bomb had burst. Now, however, the water pipe at the stables had been repaired, and Teiko and the others went back and forth from morning to night to draw water there, carrying their house keys in hand.

  One rainy night I came back late. Since there was no real entrance, I could come into the hut from either the front or the back as I pleased. When I called out to Teiko from the back door, I heard someone inside pulling out a nail. Teiko looked at me with her large dark eyes. The corners of her mouth were scarred with keloid marks that stood out like welts. One step in from the outside was the three-mat living room. After I had changed into some dry clothes and sat down at the dilapidated table, my eyes were drawn to a number of slugs creeping around. Teiko put a light supper on the table and sat down across from me to pour the tea.

  “Terrible slugs!” I said.

  “Yes. We’re trying to get rid of them, but they just keep coming.”

  Soichi had rigged a clothes closet in one corner of the room. It didn’t have a door but was hung with a tattered curtain. There was a small can full of thick saltwater behind the curtain. Teiko took it out and, with a pair of cheap chopsticks, picked up the slugs and dropped them in the can one by one. It gav
e me a creepy feeling. The slugs slithered around in droves at the base of the sliding paper doors, which did not have the customary rain shutters to protect them. The slugs were even swarming around the legs of the table.

  “Where do they come from in such numbers?”

  “Every typhoon season, we have a lot of rain and that huge area where the training ground was gets completely flooded. No way for the water to drain off. The floors are all rotting.”

  “Is it like this in all the houses?”

  “Yes. They were all built at the same time. It’s a miracle we’ve managed to stand it here for seven years. We just force ourselves to stay.”

  Because Teiko had once lived with a relative in Tokyo for six or seven years, she spoke Tokyo dialect with a Hiroshima accent.

  “The roof is made of pressed paper tiles. We used to say we’d be lucky if it lasted three years.”

  “There weren’t any slugs when I was here last time, were there? When did they start showing up?”

  “About two years ago. They began by creeping around the kitchen sink and shelves, but last year it got like this. From the middle of the rainy season last year, they started slithering out one after another even in the other tatami room and climbing up the mosquito net. Mother got up any number of times in the middle of the night and threw them into the saltwater can as fast as she could catch them with the chopsticks. It made me feel so sick I couldn’t sleep right until fall came.”

  In the six-mat room, my brother and Teiko’s two daughters were asleep. My mother was seventy-four. Teiko’s older daughter was seven. The younger daughter had been born after the A-bomb, proof that Teiko’s reproductive organs had not been impaired by the bomb. This gave our family some measure of relief. My mother, Tsuki, and Teiko’s children were sleeping soundly with their heads together. I didn’t feel hungry because of the slimy slugs creeping around under the table.