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

by J. Thomas Rimer

  “I’m sorry I come back so late every night,” I said to Teiko. “Shall we go to bed now?” Teiko was actually a half sister, my mother’s child by a different marriage.

  “All right,” Teiko said, but she did not leave the table.

  “I want to talk to you when we have some free time.”

  “Me, too. I want to have a nice, long talk with you sometime. You always look so busy that I can’t talk to you, even those few times when you come back from Tokyo.”

  “Well, shall we talk tonight? But maybe you’re sleepy?”

  A slight smile crossed Teiko’s face. When she was young, people considered her pretty, but now she looked worn out. Whenever she smiled, the scars around her lips became distorted and swollen. I had something I wanted to ask her when the chance came. I sat up straight and drank a sip of my tea, which by this time had gotten cold.

  “What are you going to do from now on?” I asked, having no choice but to speak in vague terms. “Mother asked me to ask you about this, too. When Soichi died, Yu took the trouble to come from Fukuoka, remember? And when Yu suggested that you marry again, you got all upset and wouldn’t talk to him, didn’t you?”

  “My husband had just died! Nobody should have said such a thing to me at that time!”

  “Of course, you’re right. But maybe he was half joking, the way men do. Mother thinks she understands how you felt then, so she can’t bring herself to talk to you about it. But you know, it’s been three years.”

  “The time’s gone by so fast!”

  “How do you feel now? You know, women who’ve lost their husbands often say they’d rather remain single for the sake of the children. Do you feel that way, too?”

  Teiko is the kind who would say she did. And if she said she wanted to stay the way she was because of the children, we would all be in an awkward position.

  “The way I feel . . .” Teiko began weakly. “I don’t think I could go on alone for the rest of my life, what with two children to raise.”

  “I know how you must feel. I think you should marry again.”

  “I guess I have no choice. I admire other women who go on alone, but I can’t do it.”

  All of a sudden, tears came to my eyes. Teiko’s confession brought on unexpected thoughts, because even though I was moved by her honest reply, the idea that someone like Teiko, a widow with two children, might be able to find happiness in a second marriage seemed to be, after all, only a dream. We speak of the hardships of a woman’s lot, but this was the first time I had seen them spelled out in concrete terms in the life of one of my own flesh and blood.

  “You know, those dark red stone walls you go to look at so often,” said Teiko. “The ones where the Tamiki Hara monument is. I used to walk through there with Konomi on my way to work at the women’s hall at the exposition.”

  Konomi was Teiko’s second daughter. She was born shortly before Soichi died. Soichi had asked me to pick out a name for her so I sent the name I had chosen from Tokyo.

  “You took Konomi with you to work? Didn’t Mother take care of her?”

  “At first she did. But then Kumi’s eye infection began spreading to everyone else, and for a while Mother almost lost her sight altogether. She went groping around the house and bumping into everything. It was too dangerous for Konomi to be here with them. Besides, Mother was in a bad mood, so I left Kumi with her and took the little one with me to work every day.”

  I was listening to her and nodding my head.

  “I stood at the sales counter all day. It was a cheap place. There was a big board like a door laid on its side and I hung things like shoulder bags, cheap shoes, stationery goods, and airplane models on it. I stood there all day. I hated selling models of war planes. Anyway, the customers were all busy complaining about the admission to the exposition being so expensive, so I couldn’t sell very much.”

  “Did Konomi play all by herself ?”

  “She was just beyond the toddling stage, so she fell asleep right away. Of course, there was no real place for a child to sleep. I had to let her sleep right on the ground behind me.” Teiko paused in her narrative and then went on.

  “It was a springtime exposition and very dusty, and a lot of country people came, even though there wasn’t much to see. When I was ready to leave and would go to pick up Konomi, she would be completely white with dust. A woman at one of the other counters felt sorry for us, and the next day she lent me a reed mat for Konomi to sleep on.”

  I could picture the child sleeping innocently on the reed mat on the ground. “After a little while, my eyes got infected, too, and I quit working before the exposition closed. I was all right, but I felt terrible about the children, worse than I’ve ever felt before. And I was bitter about the death of my husband.”

  Soichi didn’t die in the war. He wasn’t even in Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped. He was in Kyushu, after having been drafted for the third time.

  The troops scheduled to go to Korea were massed at the tip of Kyushu, sitting around idle; they had no arms and there were no ships to take them across.

  Soichi was suffering from hemorrhoids. They had gotten worse after his second period of military service. He came back from a hospital in Kyushu a month after the war ended. His home was on Nomi Island in the Inland Sea, and Teiko, her daughters, and Mother and I had been waiting for him there. Then one day Soichi, wearing a dirty white robe and field cap, came strolling down the island path. Mother and I watched him come toward the house. He wasn’t carrying anything in his hands.

  “Other men brought back as many things as they could carry in their hands or on their backs. But Soichi didn’t bring back anything at all—not even a can of food or a blanket!” Mother grumbled later when she came to see me in Tokyo.

  “It was OK like that,” I told her, but the dissatisfied look in her face did not disappear.

  Then in October of 1949, Soichi suddenly coughed up blood and ran a continuously high fever. He died almost immediately. At that time, Mother was staying with me in Tokyo. Both Mother and I were sick, and though we several times bought train tickets, we were not well enough to leave for Hiroshima. Mother finally left Tokyo on the twentieth day after his death. I had seen her aging face change drastically as a result of the sorrow she felt for her daughter. In the space of twenty days the brightness went out of her face, and she grew gaunt and faded.

  Strictly speaking, Soichi was not a war casualty. However, deep inside her, Mother seemed to regard Soichi Ogura as one of those killed in action. I didn’t mention this to Teiko and don’t intend to until she becomes aware of it herself.

  “Anyway, for the rest of my life I won’t forget those burned stone walls where Mr. Hara’s monument stands and how Konomi and I went back and forth through there all covered with dust. I agree with you when you say the place is ‘carved with the seal of history.’”

  “Those aren’t my words,” I blurted out. “I don’t say such eloquent things. That’s what Mr. A from Tokyo said.”

  “Aside from ‘the seal of history,’ Mr. A said that every citizen of Hiroshima from every walk of life will go on passing back and forth between those walls forever. I liked that.” Teiko and I left the three-mat room.

  “Oh, look at those slugs! What are things coming to!”

  3

  I was riding on a streetcar running southeast through the city bound for Ujina. With me was Makoto Kikawa, who had become famous as the first officially recognized victim of the A-bomb. Every day since I had come back to Hiroshima—for the first time in three years—I had met with various people and listened to their stories about the aftermath of the bomb. With eyes full of tears, I used to go with somebody like Mr. Kikawa to call on other people. Mr. Kikawa’s eyes always had a dark expression of cynicism, the kind possessed by people who have known great disappointment. They were deeply tinged with enmity.

  At certain moments he would show a glimpse of the willful and conceited attitude common among famous people who have been spoiled by
others. And yet, he understood all too well that people had made a show of him during his long hospitalization and had almost gotten pleasure out of examining his scarred body. I had seen his keloid-covered body only in a photograph. Of course, I couldn’t ask him to let me see his body. In fact, I would be afraid to look at it. But today we were going to Jiai, the city hospital, and it occurred to me that if he took off his clothes in front of the doctor, I might be able to look at his radiation-torn body with a certain degree of detachment.

  He kept one hand in his pocket. It was burned and deformed like a crab’s claw.

  “If we have time today, would you like to see Miss Mitsuko Takada?” he asked.

  “Yes, I would. She lives near the hospital, doesn’t she?”

  “Right behind it.”

  “Is it all right to visit her without letting her know we’re coming? I wonder what she does for a living.”

  “She worked shucking oysters during the winter. I hear she’s running a little store now.”

  Kikawa knew a lot about people like Miss Takada, who barely managed to survive in Hiroshima and who tried to live away from the public eye, as though they had done something bad. With some purpose in mind, he was making a list of the disabled, collecting their signatures.

  “Miss Takada has the worst face I know of,” he said in a matter-of-fact and emotionless tone. After all, for seven years since the end of the war he had seen A-bomb victims day after day and mingled with those who were in much worse condition than himself.

  “I think Dr. Yamazaki will be surprised. I told him I’d bring you sometime, but he doesn’t know it’s today. He’s been wanting to see you.”

  “Is that so?”

  When I came to Hiroshima in 1945, shortly before the end of the war, I had an operation at Jiai Hospital. Dr. Yamazaki was working under the hospital director who operated on me. There was also a young doctor who appears under his real name in John Hersey’s book Hiroshima. Kikawa stayed in the hospital for six years after the war. He was there free of charge but he often quarreled with the doctors. He tried to organize the patients who had been wounded in the war into protesting the class discrimination reflected in the treatment given in this and other hospitals at the time. Once he made plans to escape from the hospital and go live under a bridge. But he had been operated on more than thirty times, and he couldn’t move around as he liked.

  Kikawa had an ulterior motive in mind when he decided to go with me to Jiai Hospital. He felt bad about going there alone, but he wanted to get a checkup. So it was convenient for him to visit the hospital with me because in the past, I had gotten along quite well with all the doctors there. I, too, had another purpose in mind. One of my cousins, Taeko, had spent three and a half years in Jiai Hospital. She was a repatriate from Sariweon, Korea. I had never met her. Because both of her kidneys were tubercular, I thought that if I missed this chance, I would never be able to see my cousin’s face.

  The streetcar was moving through the central district of the city. We passed the bank whose stone steps had a human shadow burned into them. It was two hundred meters from ground zero. Near the bank was a new shopping street. From the window of the slowly moving streetcar, I looked at the faces of the strange men standing here and there on the streets. Their seemingly polished faces sported well-groomed beards. They were neatly dressed in bright colored clothes with shoes meticulously shined. These unknown men were a strange breed of Japanese. I had seen them, dressed in smart clothes, their bodies free of wounds, all over Hiroshima. And here and there, among the otherwise drablooking passengers in the streetcar, were women full of vitality and without a scar, looking as though they must be these men’s companions.

  They wore the latest fashions and, scattered through their wavy hair, were dyed whirls of flaming red. I might have supposed that their hair had been burned by too much hair dryer, but in fact, I had seen the same hair style many times before. From time to time, on the trains and streets, I had seen women with part of their hair in flames.

  Makoto Kikawa and I got off the streetcar in front of Jiai Hospital.

  4

  Kikawa took off his coat in the examining room for Dr. Yamazaki, head of the surgical department. He untied his crimson tie and then removed his shirt.

  Item by item he took off his clothes, seeming very much accustomed to what he was doing. Like a machine, he was doing it automatically. Because his hands were deformed, they looked like monkey paws performing the actions. Yet he was quick, without hesitation. I couldn’t look at his face, but my heart was gripped by a stifling indignation.

  Probably neither the doctor nor Kikawa himself noticed how skilled his hands were, hands that for six years had learned to take off his clothes item by item so as to exhibit the body in front of countless viewers, Japanese and foreigners alike. I looked at Kikawa’s stomach and back. Tears didn’t come to my eyes. I was beyond tears. Part of the skin on his stomach had been grafted to his back. The scars left on his stomach had all turned to keloid. There was little skin left that could be used for grafting. I wished he would hurry up and put his clothes on again. I didn’t want to look at his stomach and back any more. My purpose was not to look at the survivors in Hiroshima.

  “Should I operate a couple more times?” Dr. Yamazaki asked Kikawa, who had just finished dressing.

  “It’s not necessary,” said Kikawa with a laugh, waving his hand in a gesture of refusal. “I’ve had enough unless I get skin cancer.”

  Dr. Yamazaki avoided talking about skin cancer. He turned to me and said, “The other day a reporter came to see me from XX news agency.” He mentioned the name of an American newspaper which had dispatched a correspondent.

  “He wanted to ask me if I thought the Americans should use an A-bomb in the Korean War.”

  Dr. Yamazaki, Kikawa, and I were sitting in casually arranged chairs in the small room that had been rebuilt after the bomb damage.

  “I told him absolutely not! Dr. X was with me, and he agreed it would be absolutely wrong. He got quite excited about it.”

  X was the young doctor that John Hersey had written about in Hiroshima.

  “He asked me how I felt now about the Americans dropping the bomb on Hiroshima. I said maybe the bombing of Hiroshima couldn’t have been helped if it was necessary to end the war. But since they must have been able to see the terrible damage from the air, they were absolutely wrong to drop the second bomb on Nagasaki. Then Dr. X got very angry again and said that both bombs were wrong, that dropping the first one on Hiroshima was absolutely wrong, too.”

  “Right! That’s exactly right!” I blurted out. “It would have been wrong even to use it to end the war, but that wasn’t why they used it. They used it in a hurry because they were afraid of losing their military balance of power with the Soviet Union. It was the first step in their present world policy.”

  “Do you know how many people were killed in Hiroshima?”

  “How many?”

  “Five hundred thousand.”

  I had seen the same figure somewhere else. It was in the newspaper in Hiroshima. I was not surprised that the figures from the newspaper and the hospital matched.

  The doctor spread a piece of paper on the desk. He got a pencil and started drawing something. He drew a castle in the background of the picture. Beside the castle he wrote “divisional headquarters.” I thought next he would sketch those stone walls attached to the castle and start writing Tamiki Hara’s poetry there, but I was wrong. Instead, he drew several rectangles and put letters in each one.

  “This is the army hospital, this is the second annex building, and this the first annex. Next to it is the artillery, and here are the first and second west units. And here is the transport corps. There must have been a couple of temporary hospitals, too.”

  The doctor, himself a victim of the A-bomb, announced in the candid manner of a surgeon, “Almost all the soldiers in this building that morning were killed instantly.”

  For a while I stared at the rect
angle that the doctor had drawn on the white paper for the first west unit. One of my brothers-in-law had died there. None of his bones were recovered. As I remembered our childhood together, his shiny white teeth flashed through my mind.

  “There were 700,000 people in Hiroshima that day.”

  “That many? I thought there were only 400,000 and two-thirds of them were killed.”

  “The army personnel weren’t included in the count. It was casually announced that such and such units were stationed in such and such places, and there were a lot of people going in and out at that time. At Mutual Benefit Hospital alone, there were five thousand people, and most of them were killed. The figure five thousand reminds me that the Germans used a poison gas on the Ypres front for the first time during World War I. Five thousand soldiers were killed in three days as a result of the chlorine gas. Because it was such a cruel weapon, it became an international issue, and then someone put forward a proposal to ban the use of poison gas.”

  Dr. Yamazaki spoke in a voice heavy with emotion. Then he added, “America didn’t ratify the ban on poison gas at that time.”

  Kikawa had been resting his back against the window frame as he listened to Dr. Yamazaki. In a low, indifferent-sounding voice he said, “The office at ground zero is now registering the names of A-bomb victims and putting together statistics. I hear they are surprised at the number of people who were killed.”

  The general assumption that 200,000 perished instantly was no exaggeration. However, that figure had for the sake of convenience been too quickly accepted as definitive. The figure was a miscalculation because all it meant was that some 200,000 people had died instantly. The citizens who failed to die that first day had died one after another in the days that followed. For months and years, people died in great numbers, until there were almost as many delayed deaths as there had been instantaneous deaths. It had started raining. We decided to visit Mitsuko Takada at once.